Two Modalities of Case Assignment: Case in Sakha

Two competing ideas about how morphological case is assigned exist in the recent generative literature: the standard Chomskian view that case is assigned by designated functional heads to the closest NP via an agreement relationship, and an alternative view in which case is assigned to one NP if there is a second NP in the same local domain (Marantz 1991). We argue that these two ways of assigning case are complementary, based on data from the Turkic language Sakha. Accusative case and dative case in this language are assigned by Marantz-style configurational rules that do not refer directly to functional categories, as shown by evidence from passives, agentive nominalizations, subject raising, possessor raising, and case assignment in PPs. In contrast, there is evidence that nominative and genitive are assigned by functional heads in the Chomskian way, as shown by the distribution of nominative case and the relationship between case marking and agreement. The two methods of case assignment thus coexist, not only in Universal Grammar, but in the grammar of a single language. 1. Some theoretical background on modes of case assignment In the recent generative syntax literature, there are (at least) two major ideas about how morphological case markers come to be associated with individual noun phrases in ways that reflect aspects of the syntactic structures those noun phrases appear in.