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.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements xi Key to abbreviations xii Introduction 1 1. The history of the English case system 8 2. Formal approaches to case and the three case constraints 26 3. Case and the weak/strong distinction in the English pronoun system 65 4. The empirical survey 78 5. The survey results 101 6. Relative Positional Coding and the Invariant Strong Form constraints 148 7. Modelling the interaction of the constraints 178 8. The distribution of personal pronoun forms in other strong pronoun contexts 201 9. The distribution of wh-pronoun forms in Modern English 310 10. Speculations and conclusions 370 References 384 Name index 398 Subject index 402