Note: The published version of this paper had a lot of mistakes in the Icelandic characters and word-forms, partly due to font issues, partly to my own carelessness. This version has somewhat fewer, but by no means none, of those mistakes. It’s otherwise identical to the original though. H/t to Russell Steven Moxham; all remaining errors are (still!) my own.

Syntactic licensing of noun phrases and the morphological realization of case have been held to be connected, if more and more tenuously. In this short paper, I demonstrate that even that tenuous connection is not justified, and that questions of NP licensing need to be examined from a new perspective. Further evidence from Icelandic seems to force the conclusion that “structural” nominative (and its corresponding reflex of verbal agreement) must be available in more than one syntactic position, suggesting that the main motivation for movement of NPs high in the clause is a completely separate licensing mechanism. I suggest that the movement is motivated by the Extended Projection Principle – the notion that clauses must have a “subject”.