ECM, or Exceptional Case Marking is a concept of the Government and Binding (GB) theory of syntax in linguistics.

Introduction

Exception case marking is used in GB theory to analyze certain verbs. Verbs in English which have been analyzed as involving ECM include believe and prove, as in:

• Tim believes him to be innocent
• The prosecutor proved her to be guilty

This construction is traditionally referred to as accusativus cum infinitivo in the context of Latin grammar.

Under the GB analysis, the bold printing used in the above examples, including an accusative noun phrase (NP) and an infinitive verb phrase (VP), forms a syntactic constituent, classified inflection phrase (IP). The verb is capable of granting accusative case Therefore the NP (analyzed as the specifier of the IPn IP-complement; otherwise the overt NP (him or her in the examples above) would not be assigned to any case, which would violate the so-called Case Filter (which states that all overt NPs must have a case). The head I ('to') in the subordinate clause has a [-Tns] feature is unable to assign a case. If the IP were embedded in a complementizer phrase (CP), this would certainly block case assignment; thus ECM verbs are analyzed as taking an IP-complement.

ECM verbs are often studied in relation to control verbs and raising verbs, as all three types of verbs involve relations between the argument of a verb in a main clause and the verb of what is analyzed as an embedded clause. What makes ECM verbs different is that there is no thematic relation assigned by the verb in the main clause to the argument that receives accusative case (him and her in the examples above). Because there is no thematic relation between the main verb and the subject of the embedded clause, the assignment of the accusative case is unexpected under GB theory. For this reason, this phenomemon is called exceptional case marking.

ECM verbs and complementizers

ECM stands for Exceptional Case Marking, and applies to verbs like "believe" or "expect" which take a CP complement (CP = Complementizer Phrase; in standard prescriptivist grammar essentially any complete clause) but assign accusative case to the subject of that clause. For example, "Max expects Maria to word letters carefully." In this example we have what is essentially a complete clause as the complement of "expects" (with the exception of the infinitive verb "to word", but that's outside the scope of this post). "Maria" is clearly the subject. Yet if we replace "Maria" with a pronoun, we're going to choose "her", not "she". This means that the NP in subject position of the complement clause is being assigned accusative case. "Expect" is an ECM verb. It can assign case across a CP boundary (something verbs generally aren't supposed to be able to do).

Nowadays, though, it seems that lowly prepositions are taking CP complements (or has this always been the case?). Many of us have heard or uttered something like "I was surprised by them winning the race". Prescriptively, of course, this is "wrong". It should be "I was surprised by their winning the race", where "their winning the race" is a NP versus the CP of "them winning the race"

References

See also

• Control verb
• Raising verb
• Small clause

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