Case mismatches in Greek: Evidence for the autonomy of morphology

180 manuel espaol-echevarra and angela ralli
descriptions. More concretely, we argue that specication for a +/;Genitive
feature is involved in the morphological Case marking of Greek Nominatives
[;Genitive], Accusatives [;Genitive], and Genitives [+Genitive], and that the
syntactic operation of feature checking makes use of the [+/;Genitive] feature,
instead of more ne-grained features for Case, also available in the morphological
feature structure. This proposal has interesting consequences for
the organization of grammar. First, it supports the view of morphology as
a well-dierentiated component of grammar. Second, it assigns a signicant
role to morphology in the grammar of Case, the most structurally relevant of
all inectional features (as dened by Kuryowicz 1964). Finally, the present
proposal claims that syntax may have access to the morphological feature
structure of lexical items. The discussion is organized as follows. Section 1
contains the data relevant to our discussion, and deals with the theoretical
consequences that the existence of Case mismatches in Greek CLLD contexts
has for Baker's (1996) view of Clitic Left Dislocation. In section 2, we deal with
the issue of feature matching in CLLD chains, cf. 2.1, and present our analysis
of Case mismatch in CLLD contexts, cf. 2.2 and 2.3. Section 3 is devoted
to analyse the sort of Case-checking operation leading to Case mismatches
in CLLD free relatives as a case of syntactic syncretism. Some concluding
remarks in section 4 close the paper.
1. Case mismatches in clitic left-dislocation constructions: the data
Elaborating on Cinque's (1990) analysis of Italian CLLD constructions, Baker
(1996) claims that dislocated constituents in languages, both polysynthetic
and non-polysynthetic, form a non-movement chain with a unique pronominal
in argument position. The conditions on this chain formation are stated as
follows (cf. Baker 1996, 112):
(1) The Chain Condition
XandYmay constitute a chain only if:
(i) X c-commands Y.
(ii) X and Y are coindexed.
(iii)
(iv)
There is no barrier containing Y but not X
X and Y are nondistinct in morphosyntactic features (i.e., category, person,
number, gender, case, etc.)
According to the condition in (1iv), feature mismatches between left-dislocated
constituents and the pronominals coindexed with them are not allowed. Baker,
Acta Linguistica Hungarica 47, 2000