Case, 20 Years Later英文电子资料.pdf

Proceedings of the 20th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-20). 2008. Volume 1. Edited by Marjorie K.M. Chan and Hana Kang. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University. Pages 41-68. Case, 20 Years Later* Yen-hui Audrey Li University of Southern California The theory of abstract Case in the framework of Government and Binding played an important role in capturing cross-linguistic generalizations regarding order and constituency and accommodating exceptions to word order universals. Case was shown to be relevant even in languages without morphological case markings. Indeed, Li (1985, 1990) demonstrated that Case facilitated the understading of a wide range of grammatical structures in Chinese. However, as the linguistic theory evolved, it became possible to replace a Case approach to word order with a verb-raising analysis, which seems to challenge the signifycance of Case in the grammar of Chinese. This paper is to show that the empirical generalizations supporting Case in the earlier works but questioned in some other works are still valid, and that the research on Case further sheds light on other issues such as the finer structure of clauses in Chinese. 0. Introduction 1 The notion of Case and the theory of Case in the framework of Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981) have played a very important role in describing cross-linguistic generalizations regarding word order and constituent structures. Languages with overt morphogical case markings demonstrate well how cases are good indications of order and constituency. For instance, a nominative case-marked element is gen