From: andrews@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Avery Andrews)
Subject: Case & NP-movement
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 10:13:51 GMT

Re:  pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)


>I agree with the first point, though Sigurdsson's conclusions have long
>been known, no?  ...

Some of the data, yes; the analysis (e.g. conclusions), I'd say no.  In
fact it seems to me that Sig. was the first person to come through with a
sensible-looking GB analysis of the stuff (including things like the
non-lexicalization of subjects of `Equi' infinitives even when they had
case), plus some new data (and so it must have seemed to the NLLT reviewers
who let him publish the article without citing & refuting previous analyses).

>Lasnik's article is far from conclusive.  A lot hinges on fairly subtle
>judgments concerning the intervention of an adverb between finite vs.
>participial "be" and its object in English.

Actually, I found these judgements fairly clear, & they are also
predicted by some pretty old analyses of the auxiliary (like
Jackendoff's 1973 one).

>So suppose Lasnik is wrong
>-- again, how is English so different?

Then I guess my attempted story about expletives would also be wrong, so
we'd have no theory  of the difference between the languages.

So suppose Lasnik is wrong
-- again, how is English so different?

>>On the other hand, postverbal nominatives coocurring with dative
>>subjects do keep their nominative case in `SOR' constructions,
>>so these might involve nominative assigned by the (lower) verb:
>>
>>(c)  their segja str'akunum  hafa   verid gefnir hestarnir
>>     they  say   the-boys(D) to-have been given  the-horses
>>
>>(some people do accept accusative here, however, suggesting that
>>case-transmission & assignment by the verb are both possible).
>
>Ah! This I didn't know (was it in Sigurdsson's article?).  Are there
>speakers who positively don't accept the nominative.

No, it wasn't.  I'm not sure if there's any written citation for it-I
only found out about it myself fairly recently.  As far as I know nobody
requires the accusative here, & not that many people accept it.


>Of all aspects of
>Iceland that I know something about, it's the nominative with infinitive
>that always seemed troubling to me, if we take the morphology seriously,
>i.e. as telling us that the object case found in these infinitives has
>something fundamental in common with the usual occurence of nominative.

Do you mean the nominative subjects of infinitives, or these postverbal
nominatives, or both?  One possibility is that the nominative in
Icelandic really is different from the nominative in English and Irish,
and is in fact a null value (a non-feature, one might say, which I think
is also probably the right idea for absolutive case in Australian
languages).  Then the case-transmission effects would have to be
symptomatic of some deeper sort of sharing of properties which would be
what was actually responsible for licensing non-preposed nominatives
with passives.  Perhaps its wierd distribution should just be taken
as evidence for this idea.

>On a related matter [?] is there any account of the German "was fuer"
>...

I don't know any.


Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au