Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories
David Pesetsky
April 2012 

Sometimes it is the oddest facts that provide the best clues to significant properties of language, because their very oddity limits the space in which we are likely to search for possible explanations. In this paper, I argue that the strange behavior of Russian nominal phrases containing what are traditionally called the "paucal numerals" ('two', 'three' and 'four') provide clues of just this type concerning the syntactic side of morphological case. When a nominal phrase like the Russian counterpart of 'these last two beautiful tables' occupies a nominative environment, the pre-numeral demonstrative and adjective ('these last') bear nominative plural morphology, and the numeral itself is nominative. The post- numeral adjective ('beautfiul'), however, is often genitive plural; and the noun ('table') is genitive singular -- a situation that the illustrious Russian grammarian Peshkovsky (1956) characterized as "a typical example of the degree to which grammatical and logical thinking may diverge". I suggest that the behavior of these phrases is actually entirely logical -- once one adopts a particular structural analysis of the Russian DP. and a particular view of the nature of case morphology itself: that the case affixes themselves -- traditionally classified using case-specific sui generis terminology (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, etc.)-- are actually instantiations of the various syntactic categories: D, N, P and V. This proposal raises the possibility that there is no special theory of morphological case.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/001120 (please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001120)
Published in:	revised version, comments welcome!
keywords:	russian, case, genitive, nominative, dative, accusative, oblique, numerals, paucal, number, slavic, syntax, morphology, nominals, dp, np, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [April 2012] v1 [October 2010]
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