Notes on Case and Expletives: A Discussion of Lasnik’s Paper

Abstract

The main claim of Lasnik’s paper is that in expletive NP chains, the post-verbal NP as well as the expletive needs Case. This differs from many of the traditional analyses in the belief that the NP does not get its Case via CHAIN formation with the expletive, but rather needs to get its Case independently. In these comments, I focus my attention on the nature of this Case assignment. Lasnik, in order to account for intralanguage and interlanguage variation makes certain proposals. In order to account for the difference in behavior between be and other verbs that take small clause complements such as consider, he links inherent Case assignment to theta-role assignment only for theta-assigning verbs (such as consider), and not for non-theta-as-signing verbs (such as be). To account for the ability of Italian passives to assign partitive Case, unlike their English counterparts, he proposes a parameter by which the passive morpheme itself assigns partitive Case in Italian but not in English (or alternatively, verbs in English can assign only one Case so that if they assign accusative Case they can never assign partitive). After a detour into the empirical arguments that Lasnik gives for assuming that existential be assigns Case to the following NP, I will turn to these two proposals. I argue that the difference in fofalls out from a structural distinction that distinguishes be from verbs like consider. Then, in an effort to link the Italian/English difference to already attested variations between these two languages, I argue that partitive Case assignment in Italian passives is due to the availability of restructuring in this language.

The work in this paper has benefited from discussions with Mark Baker, Lydia White, Maire Noonan and other members of the Syntax/Acquisition project at McGill and has been supported by FCAR grant #91-ER-0578 and SSHRCC grant #410-90-0523. I also thank Jon Bobaljik, Howard Lasnik and particularly Betsy Ritter for their input. Italian data was supplied by Jenn Wienstein and Spanish data by Joyce Garavito and Adriana Chamorro.