The Accusative-Subject Generalization

This article discusses the morphosyntax of accusative-subject constructions in Icelandic, from the point of view of the "dependent case" analysis of accusative. The primary focus is on deriving the Accusative-Subject Generalization (ASG), the generalization that accusative subjects are never related thematically to a morphologically intransitive verb. After it is demonstrated that the ASG holds, it is proposed that the ASG follows from the claim that there is no such thing as inherently case-marked accusatives in Icelandic. The accusative-subject constructions under scrutiny in fact involve a silent external argument that distributes like a clitic syntactically and is interpreted like a weather pronoun semantically. The account is explanatory insofar as it involves one stipulation-the presence of a silent clitic-from which the ASG and numerous other syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties of accusative-subject constructions follow. The explanatory value of the account hinges on a grammatical architecture in which morphological idiosyncrasy and semantic idiosyncrasy are computed in distinct components of the grammar, and case marking-even structural case marking-is divorced from DP licensing.