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Schütze (2001) argues that UG makes use of the so‐called Default Case (DEF). The notion refers to “case forms used to spell out nominals that do not receive a case specification in the syntax”. The current paper presents a theory of Default Case in Schütze’s spirit, but one that is more restrictive in terms of the case values allowed for Default Case and its syntactic distribution. A crucial part of the proposal is the idea that English distinguishes between strong and clitic forms of pronouns, and that pronouns such as "me" are three-way ambiguous (clitic accusative, strong accusative/nominative).

We argue that the distribution of -n in Czech positive and comparative adjective cannot be captured by specifying its context for insertion. It can, however, be captured under the assumption that "n" is a portmanteau marker and when it does not surface, it is because the root of the adjective realises the relevant projections.

Based on their morphology, Czech adjectives can be divided into at least three classes. The first class of adjectives has the suffix n in between the root and the agreement marker, e.g., jem-n-y ́ ‘smooth.' The second class of adjectives has the suffix k, e.g., leh-k-y ́ `light'. In the third class, the obligatory agreement marker attaches to the bare root, e.g., slab-Ø-y ́ ‘weak.’ The absence of a stem marker is depicted by the Ø in the first column of Table 3. In this paper, we present an analysis of these three classes in Nanosyntax (Starke 2018), relying on the notion of root size (Caha et al. 2019).

Some Czech prepositions, e.g., pod ‘under,’ have at least four different uses: as a verbal prefix, as a nominal prefix, as a preposition, and as a prefix in nominalised verbs. We show that these are four different uses and we propose a theory of their feature representations. We address the issue of how they are realised.

There are three ways of deriving verbs in Dutch: through zero marking (e.g. adem), through suffixation (e.g. modern-iseer), and through prefixation (eg ver-breed). We focus on the prefixed verbs, contrasting two views. According to the first view (De Haas & Trommelen 1993), prefixed verbs are left-headed: the prefix is responsible for the change in category, i.e. [V ver [A breed]]. The second view (Neeleman & Schipper 1993) holds that prefixed verbs are right-headed, and involve a zero verbalizing suffix, i.e. [V ver [V [A breed] ø ]]]. We present evidence for the second view, in line with the position of Neeleman & Schipper (1993), but we in addition argue that the causative-inchoative ambiguity of many of these derived verbs requires the introduction of an additional head in the structure. Finally, we present an interpretation of these heads in terms of the nanosyntactic mechanism of phrasal lexicalization.

We propose an account of the morphology of feminine demonstrative agreement in Russian. This requires us to adopt movement-containing trees in the sense of Blix (2022) and a new version of the Nanosyntax spellout algorithm.

We show how to account for root suppletion of the numeral 2 in colloquial Mandarin. We argue that object-counting numerals contain abstract-counting numerals and that the morphology of Mandarin is compatible with this proposal. We implement this idea using the nanosyntactic approach to spellout.

We analyse sentences with the subordinate conjunction "when" in Basque and Czech. We use the theory proposed in Demirdache & Urribe Etxebarria (2007) to explain different meanings of subordinate "when" clauses, based on the hypothesis that "when"-clauses always express temporal simultaneity of the assertion times of the individual clauses.

International audience; This chapter provides a chronological overview of the treatment of degree morphology in the generative literature from the 1970s until today. Starting out from Ultan's (1972) four basic degrees of comparison, it initially widens the scope to consider other types of degree morphology. It then hones in on the expression of the positive, comparative and superlative degrees, and the way these are related to one another. It is shown how the functional superstructure of the adjective became increasingly fine-grained, with the earliest proposals (Bresnan 1973, Corver 1997b) involving a partitive layer (QP) with a degree determiner (DEG) on top of the lexical adjectival core. It is then shown how DEG is split up into a comparative head CMPR and a superlative head SPRL in the work of Bobaljik (2012), which is based on attested and unattested patterns in root suppletion in the triplet positive-comparative-superlative. Nanosyntactic treatments are discussed, which decompose Bobaljik's heads even further, on the basis of evidence from Czech comparatives and Latin superlatives. Finally, the particular position of the positive degree is discussed, in particular its relation to the comparative, both with respect to their

We investigate the pairing of adjectives and adverbs in Central Morava Czech. We propose a Nanosyntax treatment.

We argue that the allomorphy of Czech comparative adverbs can be captured in a model with split comparative head (as in Caha De Clercq Vanden Wyngaerd 2019, Studia Linguistica) and a split adverb head.

no ISBN ispartof: pages:1-122 nrpages: 122 status: Published online

International audience; no abstract

This dissertation proposes a new approach to case. It unifies its syntax, morphology and semantics in a simple, fine-grained and restrictive picture. One of the assumptions frequently made in works on case is that cases such as nominative and accusative are not primitive entities, but they are each composed of various features. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these features are universal, and each of them is its own terminal node in the syntactic tree. Individual cases thus correspond to phrasal constituents built out of these terminals. The idea that syntactic trees are built by Merge from individual atomic features is one of the core principles of a cartographic approach to syntax pursued by M. Starke: Nanosyntax. Hence “The nanosyntax of case.” I motivate the approach on the material of case syncretism. I propose a hypothesis according to which case syncretism across various languages obeys a single restrictive template. The template corresponds to a cross-linguistically fixed sequence of cases, in which only adjacent cases show syncretism. In order to derive this, I argue that case features are syntactic heads, ordered in a universal functional sequence. If this is so, it follows that these sub-morphemic features interact with core syntactic processes, such as movement. The prediction is borne out: the interaction of (phrasal) movement and the fine-grained syntactic representation derives a typological generalization concerning cross-linguistic variation in the amount of case marking (Blake’s hierarchy). Additional facts fall out from the picture: the role of functional prepositions, prepositional syncretism, case compounding, and preposition stacking. I further investigate in detail the spell out of these highly articulate structures. I follow Starke (2005) and propose that individual morphemes spell out phrasal constituents of varying size, and that their insertion is governed by the Superset Principle. I argue that phrasal spell out is both empirically required, and theoretically beneficial: it simplifies the overall architecture of grammar. In particular, there is no part left to play for a separate morphological structure. With the proposal in place, I observe that there are generalizations which connect the proposed representation and the DP external syntax. To account for this, I adopt the Peeling theory of movement (Starke 2005). The theory says that arguments are base-generated with a number of case projections on top of them, and they strand these projections when they move up in the tree. The theory is shown to capture the initial observations, as well as additional generalizations: Burzio’s generalization among them. The resulting theory does not introduce any domain specific tools to account for case: its representation corresponds to a binary syntactic structure, its computation corresponds to syntactic movement.