Prenominal arguments in Russian, German and Dutch

Abstract

Case theory has played a crucial role in the theory of how arguments are licensed in clauses. Relatively little attention has been paid to case within DPs. Most analyses make no distinction between possessors and arguments and assume they are all licensed by (some form of) genitive case. In this paper, however, we argue that a stronger parallel with verbal clause structure enables us to make a distinction between several 'genitive' arguments and allows us to explain a number of restrictions on 'prenominal' arguments which have largely been considered idiosyncratic in nature. The analysis will allow a conception of nominal structure and licensing of arguments within DPs that is very similar to clause structure. We will present evidence to show that the postnominal genitive argument, either realized morphologically or periphrastically, should be distinguished from arguments in prenominal position with the canonical marking for that position. Each argument type is licensed in the specifier of its particular agreement
projection.
The paper is organized as follows. In the first three sections we present data concerning the behaviour of genitive phrases and prenominal arguments in noun phrases in Russian, German and Dutch. In section 4 we briefly go into previous analyses of 'prenominal' genitive and possessive pronouns. Section 5 presents our own analysis, some problems are discussed briefly in section 6. Section 7 contains the conclusions of this paper.