Case in German - An HPSG Analysis
Stefan C. Müller · 1994
this paper. Thanks to Uta Waller for proof reading. Thanks to Christian Gro for the permission to use his cartoon. 1 See (Bech, 1955) for terminology. 113 The type hierarchy Heinz and Matiasek proposed is neither sufficient for handling case assignment in copula constructions, nor is it suited to describe a phenomenon called Kongruenzkasus. A new feature geometry for the case feature will be developed that overcomes these shortcomings. 2 The Phenomena 2.1 Lexical vs. Structural Case In German there is a distinction between structural and lexical case 2 . Elements the case of which varies according to their syntactic environment are said to bear structural case. If the case does not change, the case is said to be lexical. (1) a. Der Installateur kommt. the plumber nom comes `The plumber is coming.' b. Der Mann sieht den Installateur kommen. the man sees the plumber acc come `The man can see the plumber coming.' c. das Kommen des Installateurs the coming the plumber gen `the coming of the plumber' In (1), the case of der Installateur is different in all sentences. In (1a) der Installateur is the subject and bears nominative. In (1b) der Installateur is the object of the AcI-verb sehen and gets accusative, and in (1c) it is a complement of a noun and gets genitive. Nominative, genitive and accusative are structural cases. Another construction where a change of structural case takes place is passivization. (2) a. Der Mann hat den Hund getreten. the man nom has the dog acc kicked `The man kicked the dog.' b. Der Hund wurde (von dem Mann) getreten. the dog nom was by the man kicked `The dog was kicked (by the man).' If the case of the object is dative, no change takes place. (3) a. Der Mann hat mir geholfen. the man has me helped `The man helped me.' b. Mir wird geho...