Hello Prof Carnie, I have a question about how 'John' gets its nominative case in a sentence like 'There is John kicking the ball,' since 'John' is not in the Spec-TP position.
There's actually a very extensive literature on this, particularly in the late 1990s. One common approach (but not the only one) is that there is a "chain" between the existential "there" and the post-copular subject and the DP inherits its case through this chain. If you read the later chapters on minimalism, you'll learn about "covert" movement, and one way of cashing this out is that there is covert movement of the logical subject into the position occupied by the expletive existential there.
Hello Prof Carnie, I have a question about how 'John' gets its nominative case in a sentence like 'There is John kicking the ball,' since 'John' is not in the Spec-TP position.
There's actually a very extensive literature on this, particularly in the late 1990s. One common approach (but not the only one) is that there is a "chain" between the existential "there" and the post-copular subject and the DP inherits its case through this chain. If you read the later chapters on minimalism, you'll learn about "covert" movement, and one way of cashing this out is that there is covert movement of the logical subject into the position occupied by the expletive existential there.
@@CarnieSyntaxthEdition Many thanks for your replying.