Morphosyntax of case and the structure of the nominal paradigm

Oleg Belyaev
Lomonosov Moscow State University / Institute of Linguistics RAS / Pushkin State Institute for the Russian Language

Abstract. In the article I discuss the definition of case as a morphological category. On the one hand, the traditional notion of case as an affixal marker of nominal dependency is problematic due to the cross-linguistic vagueness of such notions as word or affix. On the other hand, even if the traditional definition is assumed to be correct, the morphosyntactic behaviour of case markers is quite heterogeneous: some case affixes are bound at word level, some can scope over phrases in patterns like suspended affixation. This article is an attempt at an alternative definition of case based on paradigm structure. On a sample of 107 languages I show that case status in my understanding robustly correlates with lack of suspended affixation. Furthermore, NP-internal case concord is only found in systems with morphological case.

Keywords: typology, morphology, case, coordination, agreement

For citation: Belyaev O. Morphosyntax of case and the structure of the nominal paradigm. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2018. Vol. 1, iss. 1. Pp. 51–72. (In Rus.)