Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

Chapter 2
Burzio's Generalization and EPP
0. Introduction
The so-called Burzio's Generalization (from now on BG, see Burzio (1981)/(1986))
appears to be an accurate characterization of the distribution of Accusative Case, at least for a
wide range of languages:
(1) (Structural) Accusative Case is available iff there is an external θ-role.
The biconditional in 0 can be split into two different implications:
(2) a) External θ-role -> Accusative
b) Accusative -> external θ-role
In fact, 0.a) is not difficult to derive for verbs having an external Argument (EA) and an
internal one realized as object: if there is no Accusative case, a verb having these two (not
inherently Case-marked) Arguments will not be able to appear in a well-formed structure, since
either the EA or the object will remain Caseless.
Still, 0.a) makes a prediction that is not trivial: intransitive (verbs having an EA but no
object) are Accusative assigners, so that they are able to assign Accusative to some DP.
Consider:
1