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Pronominal case assignment in English1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2013

BOZHIL P. HRISTOV
BOZHIL P. HRISTOV*
Affiliation:
University of Sofia
*
Author's address: Department of English and American Studies, St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, 15 Tsar Osvoboditel Blvd., Sofia 1504, Bulgaria[email protected]
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Abstract

Following a long tradition of research on English case, this paper first outlines the phenomenon of canonical and non-canonical case assignment to pronouns functioning as heads or dependents, and then discusses some previous treatments in order to illustrate the data, as well as to demonstrate that a unified account capable of capturing all the generalisations has up until now remained elusive. A purely phrase-structural explanation will be sketched out and rejected, to be superseded by a model relying on the formalism of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which I argue successfully accounts for all the relevant syntactic patterns. The paper ends with a comparison between the present proposal and some earlier ideas in the literature. Finally, I briefly defend the claim that English pronouns still exhibit case distinctions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , November 2013 , pp. 567 - 611
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[1]

This paper evolved after I attended the Historical Linguistics module at the 2009 LSA Linguistic Institute at Berkeley taught by Andrew Garrett and Paul Kiparsky. The trip was made possible by the generous financial support of Mary Dalrymple, Oxford's Faculty of Linguistics and Jesus College. The article has benefited enormously from stimulating discussions at the University of Oxford, the Second South of England LFG meeting in SOAS and the LFG 2011 conference in Hong Kong. Special thanks are due to Doug Arnold, Ash Asudeh, Emmon Bach, James Blevins, Maris Camilleri, Yehuda Falk, Jonathan Lipps, Joan Maling, Irina Nikolaeva, Rachel Nordlinger, Louisa Sadler, Melanie Seiss, Peter Sells and Andrew Spencer. I am particularly grateful to Alexandra Bagasheva, Mary Dalrymple, Catherine Mary MacRobert and Louise Mycock, as well as two anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees, for reading monstrously long drafts of this and giving invaluable feedback.

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