Lardil "Case Stacking" and the Structural/Inherent Case Distinction
Norvin Richards
March 2007 

Lardil (Tangkic, Australia) allows nominals to surface with multiple case affixes. One condition on this ‘case stacking’ is that when a new Case is added to a nominal with a semantically uninterpretable Case (such as Accusative), the Case is dropped; a nominal with a semantically interpretable Case (such as Instrumental), by contrast, can stack more morphology outside the Case morpheme. I argue that uninterpretable Cases in these examples are in fact assigned and later eliminated, and develop an approach to Spell-out which allows such derivations to take place, in which PF Spellout and LF Spellout are dissociated. In this approach, uninterpretable Case features are assigned (crucially, I argue, in the narrow syntax) before Spellout to PF, and then subsequently eliminated before Spellout to LF. I conclude that morphological case may in principle be assigned to a nominal arbitrarily many times.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/000405 (please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000405)
keywords:	lardil, japanese, russian, case, structural, inherent, suffixaufnahme, case concord, case stacking, spellout, genitive of negation, morphology, syntax
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