Morphological underspecification meets oblique Case: Syntactic and processing effects in German

In German, oblique Cases (dative and genitive) require morphological licens ing while structural Cases (nominative and accusative) do not. This differe nce can be captured by assuming that in German, NPs bearing oblique Case ha ve an extra structural layer Kase phrase (KP) which is missing in NPs beari ng structural Case. Focusing on dative NPs, we will show that the postulati on of such a phrase-structural difference between oblique and structural ca se allows for a unified explanation of a wide array of facts both from the domain of grammar and from the domain of language comprehension. First, wit h regard to grammar, several asymmetries between dative NPs and nominative/ accusative NPs follow if the former but not the latter are included within a KP-shell, including asymmetries with respect to function changing operati ons, clausal licensing, binding and topic drop, among others. Corroborating evidence for our analysis of dative Case in German will be provided by a c omparison with data from English and Dutch. Second, when combined with cert ain independent assumptions about the human sentence parsing mechanism, the postulation of a KP for datives helps explain several recent experimental findings with respect to on-line sentence understanding, including the fact s that dative case is dispreferred in situations of local syntactic ambigui ty and that dative case may erroneously override structural case during sen tence comprehension but not vice versa, (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.