Oblique case in prepositions: roots, constituents and agreement

Abstract

This article proposes a configurational analysis of the fact that for many speakers prepositions such as según 'following' or bajo 'under' cannot assign oblique case to a pronoun, and that in current Spanish the assignment of oblique case is impossible with two coordinated pronouns (*a ti y mí). It is argued that in the most restrictive varieties the oblique pronoun materializes a syntactic constituent that contains a relational layer (KP) together with the DP pronoun. The cases where this assignment is impossible correspond to structures where KP and the pronoun do not form a syntactic constituent to the exclusion of other syntactic heads. The variation which these combinations are subject to is explained by proposing that, in varieties that admit the oblique case in contexts where SK and SD do not form a constituent, oblique case can be assigned through agreement, which in general requires a specifier-head relationship between K and DP. This result suggests that in Spanish oblique case has undergone a change process, incomplete in some varieties, from structural case to inherent case.