The subject agreement–accusative case connection in Turkish

Abstract

This article is on the relationship between case and agreement. A noun phrase is assigned the structural case that it bears through agreement with a functional head. Several recent works assume this thesis, referred to as the George and Kornfilt Thesis, as a basic premise to provide an account of structural case assignment. The central thesis of the article is that there is at least one more dependency that needs to be assumed in case phenomena, namely that, in some languages of the world, structural object case, or more particularly accusative case, is dependent on subject agreement -the Subject Agreement-Accusative Case Conjecture. The article proposes the Jump-start Hypothesis in order to explain this dependency. According to this hypothesis, in a finite construction, case assignment to each argument is activated by a single source of agreement. The argumentation relies on data from Turkish nominalizations and restructuring infinitives.

Lexical Borrowing Targets Spans

“…The curious nature of UCENs in this paper has been addressed at least in four studies before, (Sezer 1991;Keskin 2009;Solak 2022). This section presents a summary of each.…”

“…84-85) discusses the productivity of what I call UCENs in this paper and claims that they are unproductive because of examples like (59) where the pre-verbal element daktilo fails to host arguments. Deriving from (Chomsky 1970's) distinction between 'derived nominals' and 'gerundive nominals' such that the former is formed lexically and the latter syntactically, Keskin (2009) claims that UCENs belong to the former category due to their unproductive nature 7 . Following Chomsky's feature inheritance model (Chomsky 2008;Keskin 2009) proposes that the accusative assigning property of UCENs is due to a feature inheritance from D to Pred as represented in (70).…”

“…Deriving from (Chomsky 1970's) distinction between 'derived nominals' and 'gerundive nominals' such that the former is formed lexically and the latter syntactically, Keskin (2009) claims that UCENs belong to the former category due to their unproductive nature 7 . Following Chomsky's feature inheritance model (Chomsky 2008;Keskin 2009) proposes that the accusative assigning property of UCENs is due to a feature inheritance from D to Pred as represented in (70). He also extends what Chomsky (2001) calls the "George-Kornfilt hypothesis" (George and Kornfilt 1981) to UCENs, and proposes that the agreement features of the DP inherited by the PredP "jump-start" accusative case since structural case is a reflection of agreement 8 .…”

“…He also extends what Chomsky (2001) calls the "George-Kornfilt hypothesis" (George and Kornfilt 1981) to UCENs, and proposes that the agreement features of the DP inherited by the PredP "jump-start" accusative case since structural case is a reflection of agreement 8 . Agent For Keskin (2009), a series of conditions must be met in order for Jump-start to work, some of which are syntactic. For instance, in order for D's features to be inherited by Pred, D must c-command Pred, and there cannot be any intervening functional head with unvalued features.…”

“…I conclude that UCENs are defective nominalizations following Iordȃchioaia (2020). In Section 3, I review three previous studies that attempt to explain the accusative assigning property of UCENs, two of which fail to address the very robust characteristic of such nominals (Keskin 2009;Sezer 1991): that they are of foreign origin and are in fact complex event nominals in their respective source languages. The third study (Solak 2022) equates UCENs to infinitives.…”