Lardil “Case Stacking” and the Timing of Case Assignment

Abstract

Abstract. Lardil (Tangkic, Australia) allows nominals to surface with multiple case affixes. One condition on this so‐called case stacking is that when new morphology is added to a nominal with a semantically uninterpretable Case (such as accusative), the Case is dropped; a nominal with a semantically interpretable Case (such as instrumental), by contrast, can stack more morphology outside the Case morpheme. I argue that uninterpretable Cases in these examples are in fact assigned and later eliminated, and develop an approach to Spell‐out that allows such derivations to take place, in which PF Spell‐out and LF Spell‐out are dissociated. I offer two arguments that processes like Case assignment and concord take place in the narrow syntax: one has to do with the distinction drawn between meaningful and meaningless Cases, and the other with the interaction between Lardil Tense concord and various types of movement operations.

A Syntactic Universal and Its Consequences

“…(18), adapted from Remberger 2012:288, (36), illustrates the proposed analysis. 12 If transitive deponents are associated with a nondefective phasal domain, the expectation would further be that V would not be available for probing by T since VP would, in the terms of Chomsky's (2000) Phase Impenetrability Condition, be spelled out upon completion of the vP phase (see Richards 2013 for discussion of the effects of phasal spell-out on the realization of Case/case). Even if it undergoes movement to the edge of vP, however, T would not be expected to be able to probe V (or O), given the prior Agree operation involving v. absence of Part-O-Aux order with perfect/passive participles in West Germanic comes under the general absence of V-O-Aux in these languages, as documented in section 2.1.1.…”

Case-Marking in Estonian Pseudopartitives

“…This analysis gives teeth to the oft-noted generalization that structural cases (e.g., nominative and accusative) are treated differently from inherent cases (Babby 1980;Moravcsik 1995;Richards 2012). Descriptively speaking, inherent cases overwrite the DP-internal partitive case in Estonian, but structural cases apparently cannot.…”

“…Returning to the main point, in a Pesetsky-style analysis, when this spreading reaches the N2 phrase of a pseudopartitive, the new case value (e.g., allative) is "stacked" outside the previously assigned partitive (Baker and Vinokurova 2010;Pesetsky 2013;Richards 2012 In the first step (40a), the N2 phrase is assigned partitive case (by N1). The second case value is "stacked" on the N2 phrase outside of the previously assigned partitive, as in (40b).…”

“…At that point, it is assigned some other case based on its syntactic position. When that occurs, the case value is spread through the pseudopartitive, assuming a model of case concord where case spreads from a node to its daughters (Babby 1987;Chomsky 1981Chomsky , 1986Delsing 1993;Matushansky 2008;Pesetsky 2013;Richards 2012). A schematic tree is provided in (38).…”

Evidence for abstract Case in Bantu

“…Alternatively it can be argued that the Activity Condition does not apply, either for Bantu or in general (seeNevins, 2004;Bošković, 2007), or that a DP can have multiple structural Cases(Bejar and Massam, 1999;Richards, 2013; Pesetsky, 2014), while still excluding inherent-structural case combinations like Icelandic(Jó nsson, 1996;Sigurðsson, 1989Sigurðsson, , 1992Bošković, 2007) and 'case stacking', this not being a reflex of multiple structural Case on the same DP(Schütze, 2001, on Korean). I will leave these analyses to one side here.24 As mentioned before, Makhuwa and Matengo do not have evident raising verbs, so hyperraising is not encountered either.…”