Advances in the Syntax of DPs - Structure, agreement, and case

26 Steven Franks

controller is merged. This is true whether the ultimate result is agreement, as in (4) or

(8) above, or dative, as in (21):

(21) a. Dlja nas bylo utomitel’no [PRODAT [rešit’

for us was exhausting decide.inf

[postarat’sja [delat’ èto *sami/samim]]]].

t r y.inf do.inf this self.*pl.nom/pl.dat

‘It was exhausting for us to decide to try to do this by ourselves.’

b. [PRODAT [rešit’ [postarat’sja [delat’ èto

decide.inf t r y.inf do.inf this

*sam/samomu]]]] važno.

self.*nom/dat important

‘It is important to decide to try to do this oneself.’

What this means for the mechanics of case (and also number and gender matching) is

that the system must wait until the end of the derivation to determine the features of

the semipredicative.

The MTC sidesteps the problem of letting agreement see the entire syntactic

structure by introducing the controller in its deepest position. Although the question

of how predicate adjectives receive their case under the MTC has been a hotly debated

one,^11 it is nonetheless clear that in a simple OC situation such as (18b) the MTC

enables agreement to apply locally between sama and nominative Nadja before move-

ment takes place:

(22) a. Nadja ljubit [Nadja gotovit’ sama].

Nadya.nom likes prepare.inf self.nom

‘Nadya likes cooking on her own.’

b.

NPNOM VP

TP

V TP

NPNOM samaNOM

11. This problem is particularly acute in Icelandic, in which the semipredicative appears in
    the case the subject of an infinitival would be in if it were overt. See the continuing exchange
    between Landau and Hornstein (plus colleagues): Landau (2003), Boeckx & Hornstein (2006),
    Bobaljik & Landau (2009), and Boeckx, Hornstein & Nunes (2010), as well as Sigurðsson
    (2008). For a careful comparison of the status of oblique subjects in Russian versus Icelandic,
    see Sigurðsson (2002).