TITLE: Warlpiri type languages and accusative case

AUTHOR: Mary Laughren AFFILIATION: The University of Queensland ABSTRACT: Very much in the spirit of Goddard (1982), Julie Legate argues in a mkore recent article (Legate 2008) for a distinction in languages such as Warlpiri between a syntactic or abstract nominative and accusative case assignment as opposed to morphological case assignment, although this distinction is only morphologically realized on bound pronouns. Thus the ergative marking of non-enclitic subject NPs is an exponent of ergative morphological case to a constituent that is assigned syntactic nominative case. No morphological case is marked on syntactically nominative intransitive subjects and accusative direct object NPs. Thus, in an approach similar to that of Simpson (1991) who argues for the "default" status of absolutive case, Legate argues that there is no absolutive case, either at the syntactic or morphological levels, it is merely the "default morphological realization of abstract Case features, used when no realization of the specific Case feature is available" (Legate 2008:55).