This article is about the system behind the use of case in recent Danish, a language allowing under certain conditions the accusative in subjects. Danish case has acquired new grammatical content in addition to more traditional case functions. The new semantic frame is referent description and identification, as different from referent anchoring, the task of the definiteness system. The semantic frame of the accusative has extended, and the nominative has specialised to acquire a narrower frame of content and a more restricted usage potential. Syntactically, this takes place inside the limits of the nominal construction, not of the clause construction, the level to which Danish case assignment is normally held to be restricted. Its occurrence takes place irrespectively of the syntagmatic organisation principles of the nominal, whether coordinating, endocentric or exocentric. Case variation is not a filling process at the level of expression, but a systematic choice between semantically different options: thus, it is not variation in the classical sense, and not reduceable to exponence phenomena. Even in case impoverished languages, morphological contrasts can be identified that apply across syntagmatic oppositions and cannot be reduced to these. Morphology is still an identifiable domain.
Lars Heltoft (Wed,) studied this question.