In Which Case Are Russians Afraid?: Bojat’sja with Genitive and Accusative Objects

Change and Continuity in the Subcategorization of Indo-european Middle-passive Verbs

Ancient Greek (Gk) middle verbs of fear (e.g. fobeisthai ‘to be afraid’), as Indo-European (IE) deponents in general, seem not to undergo Burzio’s Generalization [3] in its strong version, according to which verbs that lack an agentive external argument should block accusative assigning on their complement. On the contrary, Gk middle verbs of fear take accusative objects (ex. 1, structure A). I...

Dependent accusative case and caselessness in Moro*

This paper provides evidence that accusative case inMoro (Kordofanian) [Sudan] should be analyzed as a dependent case (Marantz 1991, Baker 2015). More specifically, we demonstrate that accusative case occurs wherever a DP is c-commanded by another DP within a phase, regardless of whether it is local to agentive v. The strongest arguments for this conclusion come from the occurrence of accusativ...

Processing of Quantitative Expressions with Measurement Units in the Nominative, Genitive, and Accusative Cases for Belarusian and Russian

This paper outlines an approach to the stage-by-stage solution of the computer-linguistic problem of the processing of quantitative expressions with measurement units by means of the linguistic processor NooJ. The focus is put on the nominative, genitive, and accusative cases for Belarusian and Russian. The paper gives a general analysis of the problem providing examples not only for Belarusian...

Nominative-Accusative Syncretism and Syntactic Case

Russian Genitive Plurals are Impostors

(1) a. Inflectional paradigms aspire to “avoid homophony”. The Russian nominative singular and genitive plural endings reflect a transderivational attempt to minimize homophony across inflectional endings. b. Inflectional paradigms require transderivational reference: one cannot compute the Russian genitive plural without knowing what the nominative singular ending is. c. Markedness-based neutr...