THE MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF CASE

Abstract

The preceding chapter has documented a wide range of first-pass preferences found in syntactic-function ambiguities which could be summarized by the Case Assignment Generalization “NOM > ACC > DAT”. To date, only one systematic exception to this generalization has been identified. This exception, which we have—following psycholinguistic and philological tradition—termed CASE ATTRACTION in prior work (cf. Bader, 1997; Bader and Meng, 1999), will be the topic of the current chapter. To introduce the phenomenon of Case attraction, consider the following contrasts which were noted in Bader (1994).