The case for meaningful case: The interaction of tense, aspect, and case in Russian

This dissertation focuses on the syntax of c/Case and aspect and shows that some of the most puzzling case-marking phenomena in Russian are directly linked to semantic (event structure) or grammatical aspect. The accusative case on an internal argument, for instance, is linked to semantic aspect and the instrumental case on a predicate to grammatical aspect. Only accusative case-marked arguments, for example, occur with inherently telic verbs or play a role in determining the event structure of a verb phrase. Quirky or lexical case-marked arguments, on the contrary, only occur with inherently atelic verbs and never play a role in determining the event structure of the verb phrase. Furthermore, like perfective verbs in Russian, only an eventuality described by an instrumental case-marked predicate is BOUNDED. This boundedness can be related to crossing the boundary from one situation type into another, to the final boundary inherent in resultatives, or to the boundedness of a situation type when it is contained within the Topic Time. Like imperfective verbs, a predicate with case agreement, on the contrary, is UNBOUNDED. The link between case and aspect in Russian (and other languages with rich case morphology) suggest that aspectual features like [telic] and [bounded] participate fully in the syntax of c/Case.;Throughout this dissertation it is shown that there is a hierarchical relationship between different internal arguments, including the accusative arguments of two-place verbs, and that this hierarchy is related to the event structure of a predicate and the role an internal argument plays in this event structure. VP is shown to be the non-aspectual domain par excellence in Russian. This means that no elements merged within or adjoined to VP can play a role in either the semantic or grammatical aspect of the verb phrase.;The links that exist between case, aspect, and syntax in languages with rich case morphology, like Russian, suggest that morphological case should play a more significant role than it traditionally has in the development of syntactic theory.