On the interaction of structural and semantic case

Abstract

We consider two variants of morphological case: structural case (such as accusative, ergative, or dative), which is encoded by abstract case features reflecting the semantic ranking of arguments, and semantic case (such as instrumental or directional), which encodes an additional semantic relation to be licensed by the meaning of the verb. Individual verbs may be lexically marked for either structural or semantic case. We show how a correspondence-theoretic approach can successfully describe the various patterns of structural case found in German. We then discuss instances of double object where structural case and semantic case compete with each other: under certain circumstances semantic case is favored, while under other circumstances structural case is favored. We mainly consider two scenarios, described by the respective rankings of STRUCTURAL CASE (which requires all objects to be realized by a structural case) and UNIQUENESS (which restricts a structural case to occur at most once in a clause). In particular, we analyze the different options for structural vs. semantic case in the dialects of Quechua. © 2001 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved.