A more extensive discussion of certain of the more technical notions appears in my paper "On Binding" (Chomsky,; henceforth, OB). ...

The transition from Middle English to Modern English in the second half of the 14th century is a turning point in the syntax of the language. It is at once the point when several constraints on nominal arguments that had been gaining ground since Old English become categorical, and the point when a reorganization of the functional category Infl is initiated, whose completion over the next several centuries yields essentially the syntactic system of the present day. From this time on, (...) subjects are obligatory, and they must be placed in Spec-IP position. In the VP, the last traces of OV order disappear, the order of direct and indirect object becomes fixed, the first “recipient passives” enter the language, and objects cease to be separable from the verb by adverbs or adjuncts. The V2 constraint of Old and Middle English is lost, as topicalized constituents cease to trigger verb-fronting. Concurrently, in the Infl system, the first instances of periphrastic do-support begin to replace fronting of the finite main verb, and, with the appearance of split infinitives and pro-infinitives, to starts to pattern as a non-finite Aux rather than, as in earlier stages, as a prefix marking the infinitive. All these changes have been dated to the second half of the 14th century, most of them specifically to the period between 1360 and 1380. (shrink)

Current theories make a distinction between two types of case, STRUCTURAL case and INHERENT (or LEXICAL) case (Chomsky 1981), similar to the older distinction between GRAMMATICAL and SEMANTIC case (Kuryłowicz 1964).1 Structural case is assumed to be assigned at S-structure in a purely configurational way, whereas inherent case is assigned at D-structure in possible dependence on the governing predicates’s lexical properties. It is well known that not all cases fall cleanly into this typology. In particular, there is a class of (...) cases that pattern syntactically with the structural cases, but are semantically conditioned. These cases however depend on different semantic conditions than inherent cases do: instead of being sensitive to the thematic relation that the NP bears to the verbal predicate, they are sensitive to the NP’s definiteness, animacy, or quantificational properties, or to the aspectual character of the VP, or to some combination of these factors. The Finnish partitive is a particularly clear instance of this apparently hybrid category of semantically conditioned structural case. (shrink)