Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

Schütze (2001) argues that Universal Grammar makes use of the so-called de- fault case. These are “case forms used to spell out nominals that do not receive a case specification by assignment or other syntactic means” (Schütze 2001: 205). The goal of this paper is to capture the morphological realisation of the default without adding anything to the theory beyond the default’s defining property (the lack of case features): after the DP exits syntax without case features, it is realised in the morphological com- ponent as any object would, namely by finding the best matching lexical items.
This theory is not only the simplest one theoretically, but also the most restrictive one empirically. Specifically, once combined with the cumulative case decomposition (Caha 2009), it restricts the range of possible values of the default: out of all cases, only the nominative (or absolutive) can provide the morphology for the default. This prediction is borne out in most languages, however, cases of an apparent accusative default have also been reported. This happens in a small set of languages with case on pronouns only. The paper argues that these languages, too, have the nominative as their default, but it is the nominative of a strong pronoun, which happens to be syncretic with the weak accusative pronoun.
The paper further argues that once this analysis is adopted, only hanging-topic left dis- location must be treated as a default case environment, all other environments with a suspected default (e.g., fragment answers) are compatible with a non-default analysis.

Keywords

default case, morphology, strong pronouns, weak pronouns