The Case of Q *

The relationship between morphological form and syntactic structure has been of great interest recently in theoretical linguistics, especially with respect to morphologically-rich languages like the Slavic languages. Some views have argued for an independent morphological module, without which the grammatical description cannot be complete. Others, such as Starke (2001), are embarked on a program of reduction if not elimination of the morphological component. On such a conception, morphology can be entirely done away with, and its apparent effect shown to be part of the Syntax module. The implications are far-reaching, and it is too early to determine the exact consequences, but the project is startling enough to give it serious consideration. And it lies at the core of what I try to do in this article, namely reduce morphological case (at least in nonlexical instances) to syntactic features. In the end, I will not pursue the Starke-style approach but rather will adopt a version of the restrictive view of the inventory of functional categories, based on Chomsky 1995, 2000, whereby there is a limited set of functional categories, namely C, T, D, little v, Neg, Aspect, and Q, and will also assume the non-universality of projection of these categories argued for in Thraínsson 1996 and Bos ̆ković 1997. The core idea is this--(Slavic) morphological case, is nothing more than the uninterpretable spell-out on nominals of the core functional categories. The approach is certainly not new, but the claim will be made in a form stronger than I have seen elsewhere for case in general, although it has important precursors for particular case insatnces. The best known example concerns the relationship between Nominative case and Tense. Typically, since early GB days, the