Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 21 February 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This article presents a theory of case assignment based on a hierarchy of grammatical functions. It focuses on the assignment of the syntactic cases nominative and accusative, singling out two phenomena: nominative objects and case alternations on adverbials of duration. A hierarchical as opposed to a structural analysis of nominative case provides a simple account for the occurrence of nominative objects with dyadic verbs which take oblique subjects, a phenomenon found in many genetically unrelated languages including Icelandic, Finnish, and Korean. Less common are languages in which adverbial noun phrases exhibit case alternations. This article reviews a complex array of case patterns focusing on certain adverbials which are sometimes marked accusative, sometimes nominative, depending on other properties of the clauses in which they occur.

Keywords: case assignment, hierarchy, grammatical functions, nominative objects, case alternations, adverbials of duration, case patterns, clauses, dyadic verbs, nominative case

Joan Maling

Joan Maling is Professor of Linguistics at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, USA. Her doctoral dissertation in Linguistics at MIT reformulated al-Xaliil's metrical system of classical Arabic poetry in modern generative terms. She has published on many aspects of the syntax of modern Icelandic, especially case, word order, passive, preposition-stranding, and long distance reflexives, and on case alternations in Icelandic, Finnish, Korean, and German. She is currently investigating the development of a new impersonal passive construction in modern Icelandic. She was a founding editor of the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and served as its managing editor for twenty-five years.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.