Case assignment under incorporation

Centering on the idea of Case assignment under Incorporation, I will examine in this dissertation several structures from Romance languages on the one hand and East Asian languages on the other hand. Some constructions such as Romance clitics and causatives are well studied in the past few decades and some are virtually unknown under the current Government and Binding (GB) framework such as the Chinese middle construction and partitive construction. My goal is to, by comparing the two groups of languages in similar constructions, thus contribute to our understanding of the structure of Universal Grammar.; The dissertation consists of five chapters. In chapter one I briefly outline the organization of the dissertation and summarize the general theoretical assumptions made under the framework of GB. The central claim of chapter two is that, although they have the advantage of theoretical simplicity, the specifier-head relations cannot be the sole relation that triggers agreement. Judging from the past participle agreement facts in Italian, I propose that a distinction between A and A-bar incorporation must be drawn and that agreement can be triggered under A-incorporation. In chapter three I shift to the Chinese qilai construction and argue for a unified account for qilai and English and Romance middle: a syntactic movement analysis triggered by cross-linguistic Case assignment of the middle morpheme to the implicit agent. I also develop a morpho-syntactic operation of change in complementation in this chapter to handle the addition of an obligatory adverbial phrase in middle constructions. This leads to me to tackle the French Causative constructions in chapter four, where I argue that the causative verb faire, like the middle morpheme qilai, changes the complement structure of the infinitive it subcategorizes for. Assuming this, the rather bewildering facts with respect to the Case marking of the embedded arguments may receive a straightforward account. Chapter five further explores the idea of Case assignment under incorporation by examining Partitive constructions in French and Chinese. Observing certain differences between languages with classifiers in noun phrases and the languages without, I conclude that the type of movement an NP undergoes, whether A or A-bar, derives from the fact that classifiers must incorporate into the head of QP and receive Partitive Case. The Definiteness Effect observed cross-linguistically in Partitive constructions is also derivable under the analysis. Consequences following from our Partitive analysis include Japanese quantifier floating, Romance past participle agreement facts and Chinese retained-object constructions.