ABSTRACT
Radford's contribution raises the question whether nominative case is parameterized by virtue of the fact that different languages make a different selection from a set of features that potentially define it, these features being Tense, Number, Person, and Mood. His investigation draws on six existing proposals about which feature defines nominative case and uses both logical and empirical arguments to reject all but one. Radford concludes that for English, the relevant features that constitute it are Mood and Agreement. In this respect, English contrasts with Greek, a language in which Tense defines nominative case. Radford suggests that the features form a hierarchy of difficulty with Mood being the most accessible and, possibly, Tense being the least accessible. Donna Lardiere presents evidence from three naturalistic recordings of a fossilised Chinese L2 learner of English called Patty which appears to suggest a dissociation between nominative case and tense/agreement.
