Past Event

“On nominative-ness”

Dr. Ivona Kučerová
McMaster University

Formal linguistics theories, irrespective of their formal tradition, employ some notion of nominative case as a default realization of nominal structures. Within a Chomsky style of generative syntax this typically translates into an implementation of nominative as an abstract case assigned by finite Tense head (T). Yet, nominatives appear in environments where they cannot be licensed by finite T (as in Icelandic infinitival complements), or there can be more than one nominative noun phrase per finite T (as in NP-NP copular clauses). Yet, if a nominal phrase is in nominative, it triggers agreement, interacts with other DPs in a non-default manner etc. Morphological case theories have an easier time with the distribution of nominative forms in the structure but they equally fail to provide much insight as to why nominatives exhibit these consistent syntactic properties. In other words, there seems to be a notion of nominative-ness independent of case licensing.

I provide novel empirical evidence that this notion of nominative-ness is closely tied to a person licensing and index identification (see also Sudo 2012, Longobardi 2008, Landau 2010). The core empirical evidence for the proposal comes from a micro-variation in Slavic numeral constructions: while in some Slavic languages numeral constructions are ‘good enough’ nominatives, in other Slavic languages they fail to be. In turn, the variation provides an ideal empirical ground to investigate what the notion of nominative-ness structurally corresponds to.

About the Presenter

Dr. Ivona Kučerová received her PhD in linguistics from MIT in 2007. She has published widely on the syntax-semantics interface, information structure, Slavic, Germanic, and Inuktitut.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies