ИСТИНА

This paper aims at evaluating formal theories of case assignment with respect to their applicability to modeling of case variation. Crosslinguistically, differential case marking exhibit significant variation in many parameters, including licensing factors of case variation, correlation of case with linear position, and feeding of predicative or possessive agreement. In this paper, I consider the two most elaborated formal theories of case — the minimalist syntactic case theory and the configurational case theory — and explore their expressive power in modeling various types of differential case marking. I show that none of the theories is superior to the other — rather, each of them naturally accommodates a specific type of case variation but is unsuitable to express the other types. The minimalist syntactic case theory is more flexible in that it is compatible with additional mechanisms deriving the morphologically observable case variation, and more restrictive in that it predicts the one-to-one correspondence between case assignment and agreement. The prime advantage of the configurational theory is that it can represent directly the non-local dependencies between case-marking of different arguments.