Polina at PLC46
March 11, 2022
On dative in Moksha.
March 18, Polina Pleshak is at the 46th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, giving a poster on "Inherent case masquerading as structural case," which provides an analysis for why inherent dative case in Moksha has the morphology of a structural case.
Inherent case masquerading as structural case
In this talk, I show that based on their morphological properties, Moksha cases can be divided into two groups corresponding to structural and inherent cases, where the latter behave like bound counterparts of P heads, suggesting that inherent cases are PPs rather than genuine cases. However, dative, having a syntactic distribution of an inherent case, patterns morphologically with structural cases. I propose an analysis with two independently motivated types of P heads, arguing that dative is a P head that requires a complement marked with the structural genitive, while other inherent cases require bare complements. This explains why dative patterns with structural cases, while conserving the analysis of inherent cases as Ps.