The Distribution of Pronoun Case Forms in English

Heidi Quinn | University of Canterbury

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027228062 | EUR 125.00 | USD 188.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027294197 | EUR 125.00 | USD 188.00

This book offers an in-depth analysis of Modern English pronoun case. The author examines case trends in a wide range of syntactic constructions and concludes that case variation is confined to strong pronoun contexts. Data from a survey of 90 speakers provide new insights into the distributional differences between strong 1sg and non-1sg case forms and reveal systematic case variation within the speech of individuals as well as across speakers. The empirical findings suggest that morphological case is best treated as a PF phenomenon conditioned by semantic, syntactic, and phonological factors. In order to capture the way in which these linguistic factors interact to produce the pronoun case patterns exhibited by individual speakers, the author introduces a novel constraint-based approach to morphological case. Current case trends are also considered in a wider historical context and are related to a change in the licensing of structural arguments.

[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 82] 2005. xii, 409 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/la.82

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | p. xi

Key to abbreviations | p. xii

Introduction | p. 1

1. The history of the English case system | p. 8

2. Formal approaches to case and the three case constraints | p. 26

3. Case and the weak/strong distinction in the English pronoun system | p. 65

4. The empirical survey | p. 78

5. The survey results | p. 101

6. Relative Positional Coding and the Invariant Strong Form constraints | p. 148

7. Modelling the interaction of the constraints | p. 178

8. The distribution of personal pronoun forms in other strong pronoun contexts | p. 201

9. The distribution of wh-pronoun forms in Modern English | p. 310

10. Speculations and conclusions | p. 370

Name index | p. 398

Subject index | p. 402

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Picone, Michael D.

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Jørgensen, Henrik

2012. Incongruent pronominal case in the Swedish dialect of Västra Nyland (Finland). Nordic Journal of Linguistics 35:3 ► pp. 251 ff.

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2021. Post-syntactic mechanisms of pronominal case variation in Germanic. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 53:2 ► pp. 132 ff.

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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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