- Czech in Generative Grammar
The study of Czech within the Chomskyan generative framework was restricted until recently mostly to scholars working outside of the Czech Republic, either emigrants of Czech origin or scholars interested more broadly in Slavic languages (for example, Hana Filip, Uwe Junghanns, Ronald Meyer, Milan Rezac, and Jindøich Toman, to name just a few). The situation has changed in the last decade with a new generation of recent or current PhD students working on Czech as their primary language of linguistic research. Czech in Generative Grammar, a festschrift for Lída Veselovská, one of the very few generative scholars of the older generation working within the Czech academic environment, is an attempt to present this new generation in a representative publication.1 The international community thus has its first chance to see other sides of the rich linguistic tradition stemming from the Prague school and currently being represented by ground-breaking work in functional linguistics (the school of Eva Hajièová, Jarmila Panevová, and Petr Sgall) and other generative frameworks, such as HPSG or LFG (for example, Karel Oliva, Vladimír Petkeviè, or Alexandr Rosen).
The volume contains 12 papers. Although there is no explicit thematic structure, the papers address a small and coherent set of subjects: the morphologically rich case system, clitics, focus, and nominalizations.
Pavel Caha, in an ambitious paper called “A note about A note about nothing”, looks at the nature of structural Case in Czech. He argues that what we traditionally understand as Nominative, Accusative, and Instrumental case are in fact members of a single A-chain. The idea is that a DP gets externally merged as “Instrumental” which [End Page 317] Caha, following unpublished work of Michal Starke, proposes to understand as a complex structure containing several “layers” of case, as in (1a). What we call Accusative is derived by subextraction from the Instrumental complex, as in (1b), and what we call Nominative is derived by subextraction from Accusative, as in (1c). Caha, following Starke, calls this type of movement Case peeling.
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(1) a. Instrumental
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b. Accusative
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c. Nominative
Caha provides two arguments in favor of the proposal. First, he demonstrates that there is a derivational relation between structures containing Nominative, Accusative, and Instrumental, and that this relation may be captured in terms of a movement chain (or more generally as a transformation). Second, Caha supports the movement-chain hypothesis by an observation that the three structural cases are [End Page 318] related in their morphological realization as well: the more complex a movement chain, the simpler its morphological realization. This correlation follows if morphology reflects the structural complexity of the realized DP. Thus, a DP that gets its case layer(s) peeled off in the process of movement is expected to have less overt morphology since there is less syntactic structure to be realized.
The paper also contains some preliminary steps toward extending the proposal to other morphological cases, and further developments of the proposal are likely to raise many more intriguing research questions. It would be interesting to see in the future if, for example, Dative is part of the same chain as Accusative and Instrumental. We know that Dative, Accusative, and Instrumental are structurally related, as shown in (2), but Instrumental to my knowledge never changes into Dative. This raises the question of whether a structural case is a member of a unique chain or whether it may arise via different chains.
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(2) a. Petr dal mamince knihu.
PetrNOM gave motherDAT bookACC
‘Petr gave his mother a book’
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b. Petr obdaroval maminku (knihou).
PetrNOM gave motherACC bookINST
‘Petr presented his mother with something (a book).’
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c. Maminka byla obdarována (knihou).
motherNOM was given bookINST
‘The mother got a present (a book)’
Another potential research direction is to investigate whether it is possible to subextract more than one case layer in one step or whether the case distribution facts teach us that in certain configurations there must be several local movement...