| Description |
In this talk I examine differential argument (case-) marking in Asia Minor Greek and address the issue of the relationship holding between abstract and morphological case. Asia Minor Greek dialects have nominative – accusative case systems with overt exponents; significantly, in these dialects specificity/definiteness affects the case marking of the argument either by forcing it to appear in a default case or by marking definiteness by means of a certain (morphologically overt) case on the argument. I present evidence that the relevant abstract case is always licensed on arguments in these dialects, even in differential case marking situations, and that the surface morphological case is conditioned by morphological factors. Based on this evidence, I claim that differential case marking in such systems is morphological in nature, in the sense that it is the effect of the morphological processing of syntactic structure and it emerges when certain conditions on morphological processing affect the morphological exponence of the relevant case node. Thus, Asia Minor Greek differential argument (case-) marking involves a non-isomorphism between abstract and morphological case. I put forward the hypothesis that the relationship between abstract case and morphological case on such occasions can be captured by means of an analysis that assumes a feature-decomposition-of-case approach and postulates postsyntactic operations at Morphological Structure that affect the feature constitution of the case terminal node resulting in differentiating exponence. Finally I explore the possibility that Asia Minor Greek Differential Argument Marking is a contact-induced phenomenon from Turkish, in the sense that it was ‘modelled’ on the basis of the surface effects of Turkish Differential Object Marking, namely the association between specificity and accusative.
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