case in Rioplatense Spanish

Rioplatense Spanish has no case inflection in the noun phrase proper: a noun, an adjective and a determiner keep the same shape whether the phrase they build is a subject, a direct object or the complement of a preposition, and grammatical role is carried by word order, by the object marker a, and by the prepositions themselves. The personal pronouns are the exception, and they are not a marginal one, since they appear in most finite clauses. The first person singular alone distinguishes yo as a subject, me as a direct or indirect object, and mí after a preposition; the third person distinguishes él from the object form lo and the dative form le. The record is marked contested because a competing analysis treats the unstressed object pronouns as agreement markers on the verb rather than as case forms of a pronoun, and on that analysis the surviving contrast belongs to the verbal inflection and not to a case system. The convention adopted here is the first analysis, and it is recorded as a convention: on either reading, the familiar claim that this language marks no case is true of the noun and false of the pronoun. The marking is recorded as conditioned because it is confined to that one word class.