KP/DP-SYNTAX, INTERACTION OF CASE-MARKING WITH REFERENTIAL AND NOMINAL FEATURES

This article deals with the phenomenon of alternative case-marking of objects in languages such as Finnish and Russian. This alternation is due to referential as well as nominal features. It is demonstrated that, for these languages, two structural cases are available for the object position. In order to explain this, it is suggested that the functional category D (Abney 1987) be split up into two functional categories, namely D for Determiner and K for case. By establishing K as a functional category, it is also possible to explain the syntactic behaviour of unaccusative verbs. © 1994, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.