Postdoctoral associate and alum Eunsun Jou (PhD 2024) gave an invited talk entitled “Case-marked adverbials and the timing of case evaluation” at the Comparative Syntax, Semantics and Language Acquisition Workshop held on March 8-9 at the Nanzan University Center for Linguistics. A summary of the talk is provided below:
While structural cases such as the nominative and accusative typically appear on arguments, some languages including Russian, Finnish, and Korean show structural case marking on certain adverbials. To explain this phenomenon, some researchers have proposed a distinct case system for adverbials that is separate from the case system of arguments. Focusing on Korean, I argue in my talk that we can avoid this redundancy. With the right configurations, we can explain case on arguments and case on adverbials under the same case mechanism. The crucial observation in achieving this goal is the discovery that case marking on Korean adverbials correlates with something unexpected: the position of the grammatical subject. After providing arguments supporting this correlation from three phenomena (predicate fronting, intervention effects, and the relative scope of the subject and the event), I present a Dependent Case model which derives the correlation without reference to the argument/adjunct status of nominals. Lastly, I entertain two theories about the timing of case evaluation: an Earliness-based theory where case assignment is interspersed with structure-building operations, and a phase-based theory where case assignment happens at the timing of phasal spell-out. I discuss how the latter is better situated to explain the facts discussed in the talk.