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Title:
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Head Categories and Grammatical Case in Finnish
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Author:
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Diane Nelson
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.leeds.ac.uk/linguistics/staff/diane/Welcome.html
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Edinburgh
, Centre for Cognitive Science
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Degree Date:
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1995
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Syntax
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Subject Language(s):
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Finnish
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Director(s):
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Ronnie Cann
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Abstract:
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One of the theoretical aims of Case Theory is to account for the distribution of morphological case as a realisation of abstract case assignment. Finnish, a language with a rich system of cases, provides some challenging data: in certain sentence types, full DP objects surface in nominative case, but alternate with accusative pronouns in the same environments. In addition, both DP and pronominal objects may also appear in partitive case, depending on the sentential semantics. Since the environments in which these phenomena occur correlates with a lack of subject agreement, the data is particularly relevant to generalisations that attempt to capture dependencies external and internal to VP, e.g. Burzio's Generalization and the Unaccusative Hypothesis.
To account for the data, I propose that Finnish shows a Split-S ergative (also termed 'Active' or 'Split Intransitive') pattern, and equate differing grammatical functions with internal vs. external argumenthood, respectively. One of the interesting facts about Finnish from a Case-theoretic point of view is that impersonal passives and related constructions show no effects related to 'derived' subjects, i.e. internal argumenthood is signalled by case morphology at all levels of the derivation and agreement is not triggered by movement. To account for this, I argue that the case split surfaces as the result of the assignment of two case features simultaneously to a single argument, the form of which is produced by a set of morphological realisation rules. This model for case assignment effectively distinguishes between two types of abstract case: objective case is associated with verbal semantics and theta-role assignment, while nominative case is associated with finiteness via the functional head Tense/Mood. The only environment where both case features are assigned simultaneously to a single argument is when an external argument is unavailable to receive a nominative case feature. The distribution of possessive affix agreement and verbal agreement morphology is accounted for as the result of selectional properties of functional heads specified in the lexicon. Finally, I test these hypotheses on data from complex predicates and non-finite clauses.
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