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With recent developments in Case Theory, movements in which a DP acquires a different case to the one it would have received had it not moved have been accepted as a possibility. In this paper we examine a number of such movements from a variety of languages to attempt to characterise and understand them more fully. Based in Dependent Case Theory, our analysis claims that case change does not really happen, but case assignment is allowed to be delayed under certain circumstances creating the illusion of one case over-writing another. In explicating these circumstances, we are not only able to provide a better understanding of when ‘case change’ can and can’t happen, but also develop the theory in ways which address certain conceptual problems that it faces.

We discuss two seemingly unrelated constructions of Hungarian: a type of modal existential wh-construction (MEC), and a structure that on the surface seems to be a monoclausal focus construction. They are argued to have a similar biclausal underlying structure involving control and covert modality, the latter triggering the raising of the embedded verb to the selecting predicate. To account for this movement and other transparency phenomena attested in these constructions, adjunction of the moved wh-words to a non-finite TP-domain is proposed following Šimík (2011, 2013a). This analysis is closer to standard cross-linguistic accounts of both control and restructuring: though infinitival clauses can contain their own focus-related elements, it seems justifiable to assume that they are smaller than CPs.