In this book, David Pesetsky argues that the peculiarities of Russian nominal phrases provide significant clues concerning the syntactic side of morphological case. Pesetsky argues against the traditional view that traditional case categories such as nominative or genitive have a special status in the grammar of human languages. Supporting his argument with a detailed analysis of a complex array of morpho-syntactic phenomena in the Russian noun phrase, he proposes instead that the case categories are just part-of-speech features copied as morphology from head to dependent as syntactic structur ... More

In this book, David Pesetsky argues that the peculiarities of Russian nominal phrases provide significant clues concerning the syntactic side of morphological case. Pesetsky argues against the traditional view that traditional case categories such as nominative or genitive have a special status in the grammar of human languages. Supporting his argument with a detailed analysis of a complex array of morpho-syntactic phenomena in the Russian noun phrase, he proposes instead that the case categories are just part-of-speech features copied as morphology from head to dependent as syntactic structure is built. The empirical basis for the investigation is one of the thorniest topics in Russian grammar: the morpho-syntax of noun phrases with numerals (including those traditionally called the “paucals” — ‘two’, ‘three’ and ‘four’). For example, the Russian counterpart of ‘these last two beautiful tables’ occupies a nominative environment, the pre-numeral demonstrative and adjective (‘these last’) bear nominative plural morphology, and the numeral itself is nominative. The post- numeral adjective (‘beautfiul’), however, is often genitive plural; and the noun (‘table’) is genitive singular. These and other complex facts follow directly from from the general proposal that the cases are to be identified with the parts of speech, against an independently motivated backdrop of Russian sentence structure. Building on work by Norvin Richards, Pesetsky argues that this view of case also illuminates the grammar of languages superficially quite different from Russian, with French and the Australian language Lardil as case studies.