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By the end of the Middle English period, the -s genitive in Middle English had changed its character. This chapter documents the evidence for the nature of this possessive marker in Early and Late Middle English as well as the rise of the group genitive.

This chapter outlines the theoretical orientation of the book and the rationale for a new study. The nature of the genitive case is examined and the use of typology in historical syntax is discussed. The methodology of the book is outlined.

The syntactic roles (grammatical relations) of subject and object are semantically irregular but their syntactic behavior is claimed to be syntactically unified, thereby justifying the existence of formal syntactic roles independent of meaning. Subject and object are certainly polysemous categories semantically, but syntactically they are no simpler. Ergativity shows that syntactic roles can vary across languages. Ergativity has been discounted in most syntactic theories by selectively ignoring certain constructions such as case marking and agreement (methodological opportunism). But the variation across and even within languages conforms to a universal implicational hierarchy, the Subject Construction Hierarchy: coordination < purpose clauses < relative clauses < agreement < case marking. If a construction patterns ergatively at some point on the hierarchy, then all constructions to the right also pattern ergatively. Language-specific syntactic roles can be mapped onto a conceptual space whose structure represents the semantic participant roles and the Subject Construction Hierarchy.

This chapter presents an absolute explanation for universal patterns. The following criteria should converge to identify true universals: (1) universals have no exceptions (for what does not arise by change cannot be subverted by it either). That is, they are violable only in virtue of more highly ranked universal constraints. (2) Universals are process-independent. (3) Universals can be manifested in ‘emergence of the unmarked’ effects. (4) Universals constitute pathways for analogical change. (5) Universals are embedded in grammars as constraints and can interact with other grammatical constraints. Choosing as testing grounds Binding Theory and split ergativity in morphosyntax, and voicing neutralization and sonority in phonology, it is argued that criteria do converge rather cleanly in each case.

This chapter looks at the use and syntax of the genitive case in Old English. It forms the basis for the discussion of the changes examined in the remaining chapters. Particular attention is paid to arguments that possessives were not definite in Old English and that Old English lacked a category of determiners. It is established that the postnominal position of the genitive was less frequent in the Old English stage than the prenominal position, demonstrating the inadequacy of the widely held view that the deterioration of case marking in English was responsible for the loss of the postnominal genitive.

This chapter discusses the rise of to-infinitival Exceptional Case-Marking (ECM) constructions as in, He believes the results to be unscientific, in late Middle English. It argues that a distinction should be made between the construction after verbs like want (I want you to do it), which appears to arise out of a reanalysis of the to-infinitive as THEME with verbs of commanding and permitting, and the construction after verbs like believe (‘the verbs of thinking and declaring’). It is argued that emergence of ECMs with believe-verbs is connected with changes in information structure causes by the loss of verb-second. The register restriction on this type of ECM, as well as the restriction on embedded subjects (witness *They alleged the results to be unscientific), appears to suggest that the construction is still outside the core grammar of English and requires additional routines (viruses) that are acquired after the core grammar is in place.

The central argument of this chapter is that a construction grammar, in which syntactic structures are paired with their semantic interpretations, can and should dispense with syntactic relations between the syntactic units (hence, syntactic units are joined together only by virtue of the role each holds in the entire construction). All the necessary information for the correct inference of the meaning of an utterance is found in a construction without syntactic relations. If there were syntactic relations, one would expect that they would consistently map onto semantic relations (iconicity). But a wide range of putative syntactic relations are not iconic. Also, one or more elements of a syntactic relation are frequently absent (e.g., ‘agreement’ does not agree with any syntactic unit). Instead, the linguistic evidence allegedly justifying syntactic relations (such as agreement and case marking) actually expresses symbolic relations linking the syntactic unit to its semantic counterpart in the construction.

This chapter investigates whether Basque's case-marking pattern is ergative or semantically-based. While Eastern and Central dialects can be considered to have a loose ergative alignment, Western dialects have a semantic alignment based on the contrast patient/non-patient. Historical data suggest that Modern Eastern Basque best conserves the original system.

This chapter examines the possible effects of case-marking on constituent order in Old English, and demonstrates that overt morphology does not play any role in determining verb-object order. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 16.2 discusses variation, optionality, and the concept of grammatical competition. Section 16.3 describes the case-marking system of Old English and shows that the language exhibits some of the well-known syntactic effects of morphological case. Section 16.4 shows that neither overt case-marking nor case ambiguity has any effect on verb-object order. Section 16.5 demonstrates that an analysis involving feature strength and leftward movement for case-checking is equivalent to grammatical competition, with no relationship to overt morphology. Section 16.6 provides distributional evidence for grammatical competition.

This chapter investigates the island-sensitivity of case-marked sluicing in Japanese by closely examining readings available in sluicing constructions where the correlate to the wh-remnant is a non-indefinite expression. It is shown that the behavior of Japanese case-marked sluicing can be accounted for by the copy theory of ellipsis resolution proposed in Fukaya and Hoji (1999) in combination with Merchant’s (2001) proposal for local movement in propositional island contexts. Japanese non-case-marked sluicing is also examined and shown to exhibit no island effects. It is claimed that its properties can be accounted for by assuming a structure that is radically distinct from that of case-marked sluicing. English sluicing is then re-examined, and it is argued that some occurrences of English contrast sluicing exhibit island effects while others do not, leading to the conclusion that two subtypes of sluicing occur in English as well, corresponding to the two types of sluicing in Japanese.

This chapter explores the connection between the loss of case-marking morphology in English and some changes which took place within possessive noun phrases. It focuses on appositives to possessors, which raise some interesting questions concerning the nature of what is often referred to as ‘morphological case’ and its relationship to ‘syntactic case’.

This chapter addresses the problem of ergative case marking and transitivity in Samoan, a Polynesian language. It argues that the problem reduces to an independent property concerning the syntactic size of simple predicates and the necessity of the merger of two passive voice heads in transitive structures with absolutive objects.

This chapter shows how the proposed analysis can account for apparently unrelated phenomena in Russian, namely the morphological (short or long) form of the predicate and case assignment with respect to the alternation between nominative and instrumental marking. It shows that short-form adjectives must be treated as dense predicates; while long forms are either non-dense (and then marked instrumental) or maximal (and then marked nominative). Russian confirms that a three-way partition is warranted, as it clearly grammaticalizes a double contrast between dense/other predicates (by morphology) on the one hand and non-dense/maximal on the other (by case). It finally shows that lexical categories have a different status in predication, and specifically that whereas nominals can never occur in a situation-descriptive predication (and hence be interpreted as dense), only nominals are allowed as non-dense and maximal predicates.

Modern German shares many similarities with Modern Icelandic in terms of Case marking. This chapter discusses some differences in the two languages with respect to control and raising-to-object constructions, using Dative-Nominative verbs as the test case. Whereas German favors the argument in the Nominative as the syntactic pivot, Icelandic favors the highest argument. The chapter shows how the classical notion of subject fails to deal with the data and proposes a lexical case in the framework of Optimality Theory.

This chapter presents a commentary on Chapter 3, which explored the connection between the loss of case-marking and several changes that took place within the possessive noun phrase in English. The chapter focused on discontinuous possessive constructions, where the possessive is split around the head noun. The current chapter focuses on the question of how such structures are derived and the role of Morphological Blocking in the analysis of such structures.

This chapter presents a cross-linguistic approach to measuring grammatical complexity and applies the method to one narrow test-case, namely, the marking of the basic participants of the sentence. Complexity is characterized as the length of the shortest description of a grammar. The chapter goes on to discuss three ways of examining complexity of case marking and rigid order, each related to a different way of describing grammar. Data from a stratified sample of 50 languages provides evidence that a complexity trade-off exists between case marking and rigid word order, but the strength of the correlation depends on the way the grammar is described. The conclusion is that the trade-off is best explained by processing preferences that minimize forms without affecting their distinctness.

This chapter examines the change that contributes to the extension of inflected infinitives to the complement of Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) verbs from the sixteenth century on. The chapter is organized in six sections. Section 14.2 draws some diachronic parallels between ECM verbs and control/raising verbs. Section 14.3 shows that causative and perception verbs entered both the faire-infinitive construction and the ECM construction in Old Portuguese. This is a relevant matter because it was the existence of the ECM structure that made room for the emergence of the inflected infinitive in the clausal complements of ECM verbs. Section 14.4 identifies a type of independent inflected infinitival clause, in Old Portuguese, which played a central role in the change. Section 14.5 spells out a proposal to explain how the inflected infinitive came to be allowed in the clausal complements of ECM verbs. It discusses how the change also affected raising and control verbs. Section 14.6 concludes the chapter.

This chapter asks why there should be asymmetries and hierarchies between arguments of the verb, i.e., between what are loosely called ‘subjects,’ ‘direct objects,’ and ‘indirect objects’. It proposes answers based on the efficiency principles of this book. The asymmetries can be seen in patterns of co-occurrence, in rule applicability patterns, formal marking patterns and in linear ordering. They have been described in terms of hierarchies of grammatical relations, hierarchies of morphological cases and verb agreement, hierarchies of thematic roles, and in terms of linear precedence preferences derived from the hierarchies. Efficiency provides a unifying and explanatory perspective.