The early stage of the Minimalist Approach tries to explain the role of case
under the Visibility Condition in (3).
(3) Visibility Condition
A chain is visible for θ-marking only if it has a Case position.
(C homsky (1995: 119))
It means that in (2b) the booki and ti form a chain, in which case is assigned
to its left end and a thematic role is assigned to its right end. Then the chain
becomes visible so that the noun can be interpretable.
However, Icelandic quirky subjects as exemplifi ed in (4) cast doubt on the
validity of the Visibility Condition.
(4) Honum var hjálpað
him(D) was helped (Z aenen, Maling and Thráinsson (1985: 442))
Honum, which is already assigned dative, does not need to move to the
subject position for the purpose of receiving nominative case. Therefore, within
the present minimalist framework, case theory is integrated into a feature check-
ing system with the assumption that the movement of NP to the subject position
is driven by another factor such as the EPP feature checking. In addition, under
the present feature checking mechanism, it is assumed that case features such
as uNom and uAcc do not have any corresponding features to agree with, unlike
a φ feature and an EPP feature, as illustrated in (5).
(5) [TP hei
This assumption makes it diffi cult to recognize the raison d’être of case itself
and incurs various other proposals such as Pes etsky and Torrego’s (2011), who
claim that case is closely related to tense, as in (6), and Mara ntz’s (1991) and
Haebe rli’s (2001), who argue against abstract case as in (7).^2
(6) The well-known correlation between tense and nominative case suggests
that case might in fact be an uninterpretable instance of tense (T).
(Pesets ky and Torrego (2011: 68))
(7) a. Giving content to the theory of morphological case allows for the elimi-
nation of abstract Case theory from the theory of syntax.
(Marant z (1991: 234))
b. First, it is argued that the UG concept of abstract Case, which has played
a central role for the analysis of nominal constituents in the generative
literature, can be eliminated from the grammar....
(Haeber li (2001: 279))Two aspects of syntactic evolution 199