‘Case’ categories in the Geg Albanian variety of Shkodër

In several recent publications we have proposed analyses for the morphology and syntax of case in Albanian (Manzini and Savoia 2010a, 2011a, 2011b) as well as in Latin and the Romance languages (Manzini and Savoia 2010b, 2011a, 2011c, Manzini to appear a, b). The main innovation of these works is the introduction of new categories for so-called case. These allow us to treat case inflections as ordinary lexical entries, characterized by a pairing of PF and LF properties, and projecting syntactic structure (Chomsky 1995). In other words, there is no compelling reason to treat them as abstract matrices of features, lexicalized by exponents (Halle and Marantz 1993). Here we apply these categories to the case system of Albanian, on the basis of the Geg data analysed in Manzini and Savoia (2010a, 2011b). The emphasis will be on showing that our model provides an account for the data as complete as that provided by conventional (and richer) morphological models.