Chapter 6 - Inflectional Phrases(63) a she can sing
b for him to dance
Presumably the agreement element is different in both these cases. For one thing,
modal auxiliaries can appear in the agreement position of finite clauses, but not of non-
finite clauses. Moreover, finite inflection selects for a finite tense headed phrase as its
complement while the one in (63b) clearly selects for a non-finite complement. I will
not have anything to say about the accusative Case of the subject of the non-finite
clause at present, leaving this for future discussion. Instead, we will concentrate on the
finite inflection, which assigns nominative to the subject.
The Case assigned by the finite agreement element is very different from that
assigned to the object. Obviously the former is a nominative Case while the latter is
accusative, but the differences extend further than this. For one thing assuming that it
is the agreement element which is responsible for nominative Case, this Case must be
assigned in a leftward direction:
(64) IP
DP I'
I vP
will (^)
Furthermore, this case is assigned by a functional element, something that is not
involved in -role assignment. For accusative Case the Case assigner necessarily -
marks its subject in order to be able to assign accusative Case. But the same is not true
for the inflectional assigner of nominative Case.
There are two basic positions linguists take with respect to these observations. One
is to assume that nominative and accusative Case are similar and the other assumes
that they are fundamentally different. From the first perspective the challenge is to
come up with restrictions which define the conditions under which Case can be
assigned generally. For example, there are three positions to which we have seen a
Case assigned: the specifier of the inflection; the specifier of the complement, and the
complement position itself:
(65) IP vP PP
DP I' v' P'
I vP v VP P DP
DP V'
The unified relationship that linguists came up with to capture these three cases of
Case assignment was called government. Informally this may be stated as:
nominative