engleski

Noncanonical case-marking of subjects in some West-Germanic languages and Croatian

Non-canonical case marking of subjects (also known as dative subjects, oblique subjects, oblique subject-like NPs, preverbal oblique nominals, 'quirky case') has been a matter of considerable debate for quite some time. In most traditional grammars the dative was simply assumed to be the subject because it was the 'thing being talked about', or because logic told us that it was the subject. Since Keenan's (1976) seminal paper on the coding, behavioral and control properties of subjects linguists have been trying to find at least one syntactic criterion that an oblique NP shared with the indisputable nominative subjects at some level of syntactic representation. This paper compares the so-called dative subjects in Croatian (henceforth oblique subjects) with the situation in Modern Icelandic, which provides a wealth of evidence for the existence of oblique subjects. Mention will also be made of some earlier stages of English, Mainland Scandinavian and German, which had case systems similar to that of Modern Icelandic. Given that the loss of case system and the rigidification of word order in English and Mainland Scandinavian have led to the loss of oblique subjects, one would expect that Croatian and Modern German with their rich case systems would pattern more like Modern Icelandic than like English or Mainland Scandinavian.

subject; grammatical relations; case marking; prototype theory; typology; word order

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