Grammatical Case Assignment in Finnish

This study presents an analysis of morphological case in Finnish within the Principles and Parameters framework. Finnish has a rich system of inflection for both case and agreement, making it an important language for testing hypotheses about the relationships between morphological case and abstract Case, and Case/case and agreement. The focus of the study is a set of syntactic environments where internal DP arguments appear in nominative case, but alternate with accusative personal pronouns. Because these environments lack an external argument coindexed with agreement, the data is particularly relevant to predictions made by Burzio's Generalization. By testing the generalization against a range of sentence types, Finnish is shown to contain an ergative split within an accusative main system. The assignment of the objective cases, accusative and partitive, is linked with the licensing of aspectual roles at D-structure, and finite Tense posited as a bi-unique Case assigner. The case split then arises as the result of two case features being assigned simultaneous