Case mismatches in Greek: Evidence for the autonomy of morphology

196 manuel espaol-echevarra and angela ralli
Greek of an inherent Dative Case (cf. footnote 5) checked by the verb in the
free relative, attraction by the matrix Case, as in the ungrammatical example
in (23), cf. (15cd), would entail in minimalist terms that the inherent Case
feature checked in the free relative is erased, which is presumably incompatible
with the inherent nature of the Dative case. 18
(23) (a) *Opjos dosume to vravio, tha jini diasimos
whoever-nom give-perf-1pl the prize, fut become-perf-3sg famous
`Whoever we give the prize will become famous' (cf. (7b))
(b) *Opjon dosume to vravio, i Anna tha ton proslavi
whoever-acc give-perf-1pl the prize, the Anna fut him(cl)-acc-hire
`Whoever we give the prize, Anna will hire him'
However, there is no strong evidence supporting the inherent status of Dative
case (morphologically genitive) in Modern Greek. Furthermore, there seems to
be evidence for the contrary. If the Genitive ontu orfanotrou 'the orphanage'
was the morphological expression of an inherent Dative in (24), we would
expect this Case marking to be preserved in the nominalized counterpart. The
ungrammaticality of (24b) shows that this expectation is not fullled: 19
(24) (a) Dosame tu orfanotrou polla ruha
gave-perf-1pl the-gen orphanage-gen many clothes
(b) *I dorea tu orphanotrou (under a non-possessive interpretation)
the gift the-gen orphanage-gen
18
The assumption that inherent Case cannot be erased is supported by thetypical behavior
of inherently Case marked constituents under passivization, as in the examples
in (i) showing that dative case in German is retained under passivization:
19
(i) a. *er wird geholfen
he-nom is helped
b. ihm wird geholfen
he-dat is helped cf. Belletti (1988)
The fact that inherent case features cannot be erased from syntactic derivations before
Spell-Out does not necessarily imply that they are +Interpretable features. We would
like to claim that it is the -relation the inherent Case is associated with, and not the
Case feature per se, which is +Interpretable.
It may be the case that the licensing of Dative arguments involves both inherent and
structural cases, along the lines suggested in Torrego (1998). This would account for
the ungrammaticality ofthe nominalized counterpart where the hypothetical structural
case could not be checked. We will not consider this possibility in this paper.
Acta Linguistica Hungarica 47, 2000