Towards a Minimalist Account of Quirky Case and Licensing in Icelandic

In this paper I account for a range of facts about the position and form of arguments in Icelandic using a theory that is based on Chomsky’s (1993) Minimalist program, but that incorporates morphological case as well as positional licensing. The analysis both assumes and reinforces the view that positional licensing (“abstract Case”) is independent of (morphological) case and all arguments must check both case and licensing features in order for a derivation to converge. It has been a central question in the analysis of Icelandic from various perspectives how these two phenomena interact, given that case does not correlate with position as straightforwardly as in other well-studied languages. Conversely, case and agreement do correlate very tightly in Icelandic, and this correlation should be capturable in the theory. The nature of “quirky case marking”1 has been par-

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