Case Assignment: A Comparison between Agreement-based versus Dependent Case Accounts

This major research paper (MRP) aims to review the literature that has looked into Case theories from a generative grammar perspective from Government and Binding (Chomsky, 1981) onwards. Specifically, it offers a critical examination of the agreement-based Case account (Chomsky, 1981, 1995, 2000, 2001, etc.) and the dependent Case account (Marantz, 1991), and discusses their contribution to our current understanding of syntactic Case valuation on nominal arguments. Various counterevidence is also presented, which raises potential problems for both accounts.