Case mismatches in Greek: Evidence for the autonomy of morphology

182 manuel espaol-echevarra and angela ralli
(4) ()I tites, i kathigites tus agapane olus 3
the students-nom, the professors-nom them-acc love-3pl all-acc
`The professors love all the students' (or The students, the professors love them all)
In (3a), the head of the dislocated free relative opjos occurs in nominative
case, although it is coindexed with an accusative clitic, i.e., ton. In (3b), the
head of the dislocated free relative opjon is in the same case (Accusative) as
the coindexed clitic in the matrix clause, but this Accusative case cannot be
checked against the verb of the relative which requires nominative case. In (4),
the dislocated DP i tites `the students' shows nominative case, but it is coindexed
with an accusative clitic, i.e., tus `them'. These Case mismatches pose
a problem for Baker's (1996) unied account of dislocated constituents in both
polysynthetic and non-polysynthetic languages. In addition, the examples in
(3) and (4) raise more general questions on Case theory. In (3b), the Nominative
syntactic or abstract Case associated with the verb grapsi `write-perf' does
not show up on any lexical item of the sentence, whereas (3a) indicates that
it may show up, cf. opjos `whoever-nom'. On the other hand, the nominative
Case of the CLLD DP i tites `the students-nom' does not seem to be related
to any syntactic Case assigned by theverb agapane `love-3pl' in (4).
The examples in (3)(4) call for a reformulation of Baker's Chain Condition
in (1), particularly, in relation to the nondistinctiveness in Case condition
on the elements of a non-movement chain. This reformulation should be able
to account also for the two following facts. (a) The relative pronoun or the
DP must bear the Case marker checked by the matrix verb if they appear in
a non-dislocated position. Compare (5a) to (3a) and (6a) to (4), respectively:
3
Case mismatches such as the one illustrated in (4) are always slightly deviant, as indicated
by the question mark, although grammatical. As noted by Tzartzanos (1946),
this type of Case mismatches are much better if some material (related to the dislocated
constituent) intervenes between the dislocated constituent and the rest of the
sentence:
(i) I kira-Rini tu Kritu, tu Duka i
the-nom miss-Irene-nom the-gen Kritos-gen, the-gen Duka-gen the-nom
thigatera, xronia tis etimazun ta prikia
daughter-nom, years-acc her-gen prepare-3pl the dot
`Mrs. Irene of Kritos, Duka's daughter, they prepare her dot for years'
(from Tzartzanos (1946, 264))
In spite of the dierence in acceptability between (3) and (4), we will treat Case mismatches
involving topicalized free relatives, cf. (3) in the text, and Case mismatches
involving topicalized DPs, cf. (4), in a unied way. Both cases illustrate Case mismatches
in CLLD chains.
Acta Linguistica Hungarica 47, 2000