Finnish Structural Case: Myths, Facts, and a New Analysis
December 3, 2025
Online (zoom)
Starts at 20:00 (Moscow time)
Paul Kiparsky
Stanford University
Abstract
The Case Licensing framework (Kiparsky 2000, Wunderlich 2001, Galbraith 2022) distin- guishes between Abstract Case, which is represented at Argument Structure, and morphosyntactic case, which is represented in syntactic structure. At both levels, case is decomposed by the features [±H(ighest) R(ole)] and [±L(owest) R(ole)].
From the perspective of this approach, the apparent complexity of Finnish case stems largely from the fact that it has Differential Object Marking (DOM) at two levels: Abstract Case, where Accusative is distinguished as a marked Case from Partitive, and morphological case, where ab- stract Accusative Case is in turn mapped into nominative, accusative, genitive, and partitive.
I present a simple analysis of Finnish structural case in the Case Licensing approach, and three classes of arguments that support the analysis, and the theory on which it is based, against alternative accounts offered by Cognitive Grammar and GB/Minimalism.
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Evidence from word order, co-ordination, and ellipsis shows that accusative objects occupy the same syntactic position as partitive objects. So accusative case is not assigned/checked by a higher Aspect head (as in Kratzer 2004, Baker 2015, 2021; Vainikka & Brattico 2014, among others).
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Lexical semantic evidence shows that the distinction between Accusative and Partitive ob- jects is structural, and not simply a matter of telicity.
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The four morphosyntactic realizations of abstract Accusative Case are not arbitrary, and involve neither case homonymy (Huumo 2023) nor allomorphy (Baker 2015). In the Case Licensing analysis, the featural decomposition of case and basic principles of the theory predict this mapping from first principles.