Finiteness, Case and Agreement

• Published in: LingBuzz
• Main Author: Aygen, Gulsat
• Format: Paper
• Language: English
• Published: Tromso Universitetet i Tromsoe 01.01.2004
• Subjects: Agreement (Grammatical); Agreements; Clauses; Embedded constructions; Evidentiality; Finiteness; Grammatical case; Greek language; Infinitives; Modality (Semantic); Noun phrases; Phi features; Predicate; Tense; Turkic languages

The core theoretical claim questioned in this paper is the exclusively +Tense oriented theory of Nominative case-licensing that parametrizes languages according to the feature on T, i.e.+tense or +phi features/Agreement (Chomsky 1981, 2001, George & Kornfilt 1981, Raposo 1987, among others). The core data to be analyzed is Turkish inflected embedded clauses with agreement and ECM with optional agreement: Nominative-Subject Complement Clause and Accusative-Subject Complement Clause. Turkish has been argued to be a language like European Portuguese (Raposo 1987) in which not tense but agreement defines finiteness (George and Kornfilt 1981), and licenses nominative case. I argue that in Turkic languages and possibly in Romance Inflected Infinitives, the feature licensing Nominative Case is a not Agreement per se as claimed (Kornfilt 1984, 2002) but a complex feature consisting of a feature in the C(omp) system, i.e. mood, and a feature in the I(nfl)/T(ense) system, i.e. epistemic modality. The prediction of the proposed analysis is the ECM Hypothesis: lack of either one or both components of nominative case feature on I/T and C renders the structure non-finite. Non-nominative subject case, i.e. Accusative or Genitive, must then be licensed by the functional head available above the embedded clause: vP or DP. This prediction is attested in English, European Portuguese, Catalan, and Greek, among others. The major theoretical implication of this study is un-coupling case and agreement.