SINHALA CASE MARKING, MODALITY, AND A-MOVEMENT

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Introduction Indo-Aryan languages, spoken in the Indian subcontinent, are well-known for their quirky case marking on the subject (Verma & Mohanan 1990). Case marking in Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan isolate (Gair 1982) spoken by around 16 million people in Sri Lanka, is no exception: the subject of a finite clause in Sinhala can be morphologically marked by a variety of cases such as nominative (unmarked), accusative, dative or instrumental (Gair 1990). An assumption holds in some recent syntactic literature that different case marking on the subject NP in Sinhala is entirely determined by the semantics of the verb (Inman 1994; Henadeerage 2002; Jany 2005). This has commonly been explored with regard to the semantic notion of (in)volitivity of Sinhala verbs. 1 For instance, Henadeerage (2002), following Inman (1994), assumes that the volitive verb (denoting volitional intentional action) inherently assigns nominative case to the subject as in (1), while the involitive verb (denoting an involuntary action) inherently assigns dative case to the subject as in (2): (1) laməya sellam-kərannə yanəwa. child (NOM) play-do (VOL-INF) go (VOL-PRES) 'The child is going to play.' (2) laməyatə sellam-kərannə hituna. child (DAT) play-do-(VOL-INF) think-(INVOL-PRES) 'The child thought of playing.' (It just came to his/her mind.) (Henadeerage 2002: 79) This semantic approach to Sinhala case marking receives further support in Jany (2005) who argues that in Sinhala, " argument marking is not assigned on the basis of grammatical relations, but is dependent on a series of semantic properties of the argument, such as animacy, semantic role, and definiteness, and on the semantic and lexical properties of the verb, in particular on volitivity " (p. 70). However, contrary to the general assumption in existing literature (e.g., Henadeerage 2002; Inman 1994; Jany 2005), in this paper, we argue that case marking in Sinhala is not entirely determined by the semantics of the verb. Based on previously unnoticed data, we propose that only an involitive verb assigns inherent dative case to its subject, whereas nominative case is not lexically associated with volitive verbs; rather, it is a structural case valued by a finite T. Our argument is based on (i) the scope interpretation of subject quantifiers, (ii) the (in)compatibility between ECM contexts and (in)volitive predicates, and (iii) the interaction between case marking and the interpretation of modals. One important consequence of our proposal is that A-movement in Sinhala is triggered by case valuation, 1 Most Sinhala verbs can be semantically classified as volitive and involitive verbs. Volitive verbs denote volitional intentional action while involitive verbs denote non-volitional unintentional states of affairs (