Parameters redistributed: Vestigial case morphology in Germanic

Description

In this talk, I argue that Emonds’s (1986) early treatment of English pronominal case-form variation is essentially correct, and implement his analysis, adding significant modifications (Parrott 2007: Chapter 6), within the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle and Marantz 1993, Embick and Noyer 2007). One of Emonds’s important insights is that intra-individual variation in pronominal case forms reveals an unrecognized inter-individual (i.e., “parametric”) difference in the mechanisms of Germanic case morphology. Pronominal allomorphy in ‘vestigial case’ languages like English does not involve abstract (morpho)syntactic Case/case features at all. Instead, vestigial case forms in English are contextual allomorphs, exponents of a pronoun’s structural context, but not of its case features. An advantage of the DM/Emonds vestigial-case theory is that it makes testable predictions in three domains. This talk focuses on the morphosyntactic-structural and cross-linguistic predictions made by the theory (for predictions in language acquisition, see Parrott 2008).
Emneord: Faculty of Humanities: case, morphosyntax, Distributed Morphology, English, Danish, Scandinavian, Germanic

Period	23 Oct 2008
Event title	Parameters redistributed: Vestigial case morphology in Germanic
Event type	Conference
Organiser	Grammar in My Mind (GRIMM) Seminar
Location	Lund University, Lund, SwedenShow on map