In German, oblique Cases (dative and genitive) require morphological licensing while structural Cases (nominative and accusative) do not. This difference can be captured by assuming that in German, NPs bearing oblique Case have an extra structural layer Kase phrase (KP) which is missing in NPs bearing structural Case. Focusing on dative NPs, we will show that the postulation of such a phrase-structural difference between oblique and structural case allows for a unified explanation of a wide array of facts both from the domain of grammar and from the domain of language comprehension. First, with regard to grammar, several asymmetries between dative NPs and nominative/accusative NPs follow if the former but not the latter are included within a KP-shell, including asymmetries with respect to function changing operations, clausal licensing, binding and topic drop, among others. Corroborating evidence for our analysis of dative Case in German will be provided by a comparison with data from English and Dutch. Second, when combined with certain independent assumptions about the human sentence parsing mechanism, the postulation of a KP for datives helps explain several recent experimental f'mdings with respect to on-line sentence understanding, including the facts that dative case is dispreferred in situations of local syntactic ambiguity and that dative case may erroneously override structural case during sentence comprehension but not vice versa.The work underlying this article has been supported by a grant by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (Ba-1178/4-1) to the first and second investigator and to Jens-Max Hopf. Part of the results were presented 1998 at a workshop of the Sonderforschungsbereich Theorie des Lexikons at the University of Cologne and at the Workshop on Morphological Case at the University of Utrecht. We wish to thank both audiences for stimulating discussion, especially Denis Bouchard, Lyn Nichols, Albert Ortmann and Dieter Wunderlich. Thanks to Peter Suchsland and Ralf Vogel far clarifying discussion, to Susanne Trissler for a number of suggestions as well as to Frans Hinskens, Henk van Riemsdijk. Manrice Vliegen and Jan-Wouter Zwart for their help with the Dutch data and L~iszl6 Moln~rfi for his help
Abstract• In an ERP stud\', German sentences were investigated that contain a case-ambiguous ;\IP that mav be assigned accusative or dative case. Sentences were disambiguated by the "erb in final position of the sentence. As our data show. sentences ending in a verb that assigns dative case to the ambiguous NP elicit a clear garden-path effect The garden-path effect was indicated by a broad centro-posterior negative shift that occurred between 300 and 900 msec after the dative-assigning verb was presented.~o enhanced P600 following the misanalysis was observed,~oun phrases whose case ambiguity was resolved in favor of accusative case and unambiguouslv dativemarked NPs did not trigger significant ERP differences. We will discuss the implications of our results for parsing and its
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