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Chapter 13 - Case in Germanic

from Part II - Morphology and Agreement Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2020

By
Thomas McFadden
Edited by
Michael T. Putnam  and
B. Richard Page
Michael T. Putnam
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
B. Richard Page
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Summary

This chapter provides a synchronic and diachronic overview of morphological case in the Germanic languages, as well as its relationship to phonology, syntax, and semantics. After some terminological and typological preliminaries, I begin with coverage of the different case inventories found in the various Germanic languages, laying out the relevant morphological details and the tracking the changes that effected the steady reductions in the systems across historical stages. I then move on to a description of how the cases in a given inventory are distributed across grammatical environments, and how this correlates with syntactic, semantic, and lexical factors. Finally, I tackle a series of empirical and theoretical questions surrounding the interactions of case with other grammatical phenomena, which are of general cross-linguistic interest, but where the Germanic languages have played an especially important role in the literature. These include how cases relate to grammatical functions, the status of apparent oblique subjects and `quirky case‘, and more broadly what case phenomena might tell us about how morphology interfaces with syntax.

Keywords

caseloss of inflectionsyncretismgrammatical functionsthematic rolesquirky and inherent casesyntax-morphology interface
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics , pp. 282 - 312
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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