Case Marking and Subject Extraction in Danish

In Danish, case inflection is only observed among personal pronouns. The generalization is that subjects are nominative while other grammatical functions are accusative. Pronominal subjects extracted across a clause boundary, however, are in the accusative case. This use is observed in an informal register while standard Danish does not seem to allow non-local extraction of case-inflected pronominals at all. The paper shows that this use of the accusative is constructionally determined and that it, though limited to a certain register, serves a crucial disambiguating function in signalling that the accusative DP is not a matrix subject. The analysis is cast within the framework of Constructive Case. The paper demonstrates how Constructive Case can capture this kind of constructional case assignment while restricting case distinctions to a specified set of words. In this way no case is postulated for nominals which do not show any morphological case distinction. Furthermore it is shown how the pattern of variation between an informal and a standard register, can be accommodated through a small difference in the lexical entries of the personal pronouns. Finally, the paper explores other ways of accounting for the distribution of the forms of the personal pronouns in Danish and it shows that these alternatives are problematic on both empirical as well as on theoretical grounds. This discussion sheds light on the syntax of extraction in Danish inasmuch as it shows that extracted subjects are never associated with an empty category (neither locally nor non-locally) while other extracted grammatical functions are.