A situation-theoretic approach to case marking semantics in Turkish

Several views of specificity have been characterized on the basis of the contrast between accusative-case-marked and non-case-marked direct objects in Turkish. This article claims that the specificity status of the referent of an NP, in one manner or other, cannot be the ultimate criterion for this NP to carry or not to carry case morphology. Instead, it is argued that the determining factor in case marking alternations in Turkish is the informational status of the NP in the partitioning of the semantic material of the sentence between described and resource situations: if its descriptive content is not part of what characterizes the situation described by the sentence, the NP bears case morphology; otherwise, it appears without case morphology.