On the Syntactic Status of the Uyghur Functional Category K (Case)
(53rd Annual Meeting of the PIAC, St. Petersburg 2010)
In the previous content word-oriented theoretical frames of traditional and structural grammar, the Uyghur case (K) is treated as a grammatical category of a noun, that is an adjunctive component of a noun, and never gained a syntactic status of its own. As a result, the following two problems escaped from our sight till today: first, the fact that a case (K) member can merge with all kinds of nominal categories including adjective, numeral, number-measure word structure, pronoun, onomatopoeic word, nominalized phrase, adjectivalized phrase, plural phrase and possessive phrase and can form its own phrase remained unexplained. Second, the fact that what a case member is merging with is not only a noun stem, but a whole nominal phrase is remained unexplained. This paper attempts to provide the problems with reasonable explanations in the light of the functional word-oriented frame of generative syntax theory.