A . Davison 1 Structural Case . Lexical Case and the Verbal Projection

1.INTRODUCTION Transitivity is an ambiguous term. It can refer to the argument structure of a predicate, distingishing monovalent verbs with a single argument, from polyvalent verbs which obligatorily or optionally assign theta roles to more than one argument It can also refer to morphological and syntactic properties, such as the choice of case and the selection of auxiliary verbs. Ideally, these surface formal markers of transitivity would align with semantic argument structure, and surface properties of the sentence would fall out automatically from the semantic/lexical properties of the predicate. From the statement of the simple X' notion of a VP projection containing objects, in Chomsky 1981, theoretical ideas have evolved about how verbs project a syntactic phrase in which the arguments are assigned theta-roles, have their case licensed and are in the right configuration to account for binding and other relations. The particular issue of syntactic projection of verbs which I will investigate in this paper is whether all (semantically) transitive verbs in Hindi/Urdu have the same kind of syntactic projection of the verb. In this language, the morphological criteria for transitivity do not all define the same set of sentences, if all the various types of polyvalent verbs are considered. For example, some direct objects and most subjects have nominative case, and can (depending on other conditions in the sentence) trigger verb agreement. Some verb types very clearly define a transitive subject, because it may have ergative case and consistently binds reflexives, but other subjects which bind reflexives must have dative case, and can also behave syntactically as non-subjects. I will propose two kinds of verbal projection, one which is a standard VP shell projection separating the light verb projection including the subject argument from the V and object, and another which is a simple VP, more like an 'unaccusative ' projection with an additional argument. The discussion of transitive verbs is wider here than in Mahajan 1990, which first gave an account of syntax and morphology in Hindi. within a Chomskyan grammar based on feature checking. Mahajan's proposal locates the case and phi features of subject and objects in projections of the head AGR. In this paper I am assuming a version of the Minimalist Program with case and agreement features on TENSE and the light verb v within the verbal projection, rather than on separate AGR projections, following Chomsky 1995, chapter 4. I also adopt the parameterized …