The German locative-directional alternation

Abstract

I investigate the locative-directional alternation in German, expressed by the change of case on the complement of a preposition, and its consequences for the theory of case in general. I argue that oblique cases and structural cases are assigned in a uniform manner, but they are distinct in the amount of functional structure: oblique case contains structural case. Following Starke (2005), I claim that oblique cases can be promoted to structural cases by stranding layers of oblique case.

Modeling declensions without declension features. The case of Russian

“…It has been argued in the literature (Caha 2009;Bobaljik 2012;De Clercq 2013) that p ABA constraints point to a type of feature decomposition that can be called 'cumulative.' The idea is that the number of features monotonically grows as we move from the nominative to the accusative and on.…”

“…When, in addition, we merge the feature F 2 on top of the nominative, the result is the accusative case, and so on. This proposal allows us first of all to capture all adjacent case syncretisms by a simple application of the Superset Principle (Caha 2009). Second, it also allows us to extend our analysis of the declension differences from the nominative case to all the other cases, including the instrumental.…”

“…p ABA pattern cannot be derived (though seeCaha 2017;Bobaljik & Sauerland 2018; Vanden Wyngaerd et al 2020) for other ways of representing the p ABA). In this article (following Caha 2009), I understand each of the case features in (57) as a separate syntactic head (cf Caha 2010)…”