What Really Determines Case Government in Old English?

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of what, besides grammatical roles or functions, determines the case government of Old English (OE) verbs by explaining what really distinguishes each OE morphological case. On the basis of the distinctions in passivization possibilities in OE, I propose an 'obliqueness hierarchy' among OE NP arguments, which results in an enriched interpretation of the case features of OE verbs, and then show that relative obliqueness plays a central role in the case government of OE verbs. I also explain many interesting examples of OE case government including the question of why a certain case is used for a preposition-verb compound verb when more than one case is logically possible.