Structural case

Definition
Structural case is a case which is assigned in a certain structural configuration, depending on government (and adjacency) only (as opposed to inherent case).

Example
It has been proposed that a verb assigns structural Accusative case to its NP complement, and that Nominative case is assigned by the finite inflection INFL to the canonical subject position [NP,IP]. More recently, structural case is identified with case assignment to the specifier in a specific kind of AGRP.

Links

 * Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics