Novel data from participial imperatives in German exhibits a previously unnoticed alternation in the case-licensing of internal arguments. In the presence of a (nominative) quantificational subject, the internal argument is assigned accusative case. If the subject is demoted to an adjunct by-phrase, on the other hand, the internal argument carries nominative case. While this at first sight could be traced back to the supposed ambiguity of a perfect and a passive participle, the present paper shows that directive root participles cannot simply be elliptical variants of the periphrastic perfect and the periphrastic passive. Rather, it relates the non-sentential configurations at hand to similar empirical domains (the HAVE-perfect in Germanic and the so-called 'new passive' in Icelandic) which point to the role of the subject in properly licensing the internal argument. This paves the way for a syntactic account based on the bundling of functional heads, which allows us to account for the new empirical data against the backdrop of Dependent Case Theory (DCT) and Burzio's Generalization (BG).