Jeffrey Goldberg (J.Goldberg@cranfield.ac.uk)
Mon, 17 Jul 1995 18:41:00 +0100 (BST)
On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, Gert Webelhuth wrote: [Many arguments about why "ein Held zu sein" is a single constituent projection of V] Gert, You have persuaded me, along with Kai Lebeth who gave yet another argument. I am at a loss to explain where the NP in "ein Held zu sein" gets its case. Can you construct examplies with verbs other than "sein", since `be' is funny in all languages. Following up on what another poster has said, it could be the case that "sein" optionally assigns nominative case to its complement, "Held" in this instance, or passes through case agreement from a subject. I had originally thought that "ein Held" was the subject of "sein", but I was just confused. The infinitive is not assigning case to its subject, but to its complement. Of course since it normally passes agreement from its subject to its complement, there is still a question of where the nominative comes from. One naive proposal is that what we call nominative in German is merely the absense of case. No doubt you will show me (who doesn't know any German) why I am wrong about this. Another proposal might be as someone already said. Nominitave is given by some trick to non-controlled subjects. That could be done by saying that there are two "sein"s with SUBJ <[CASE X:1]:2> COMP <XP[SUBJ Y:2,CASE Z:1]> and SUBJ <> COMP <XP[SUBJ|INDEX arb], CASE NOM> So "sein" with subject passes case through to its complement, "sein" without a subject just gives nominative case to its complement. We do have a problem with this construction, but I am not yet convinced that it is an instance of an infinitive assigning nominative case to its subject. Anyway, I am going home. I look forward to seeing what the North Americans say about this when they read their mail. Best wishes, -jeff Jeffrey Goldberg Email: J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk WWW: <http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/>
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