Xâ° categories and grammatical case assignment in Finnish
Finnish, a heavily agglutinating language with a rich system of inflectional and derivational morphology, provides relevant data for testing predictions made by various proposals within Principles and Parameters-based syntactic frameworks, particularly Case Theory, Burzio's Generalization, and X-Bar Theory. One phenomenon which has recently attracted attention in the generative literature is the alternation in certain syntactic environments between animate pronouns in accusative case and full DP objects in nominative case, both of which may appear with partitive case morphology depending on sentential aspect and definiteness. The contexts where this alternation surfaces include impersonal passive, unaccusative, raising and imperative sentence types, where AGR fails to be coindexed with an external argument. This pattern of case assignment, where internal arguments of lexically or syntactically unaccusative verbs (i.e. single arguments of a one-place predicate) may or may not be case-coded as having the same grammatical function as objects of transitives, is typical of split-ergative (specifically Split-S) case systems. An analysis of split-ergativity is proposed which accounts for the phenomenon as the result
Nelson, Diane Carlita
Xâ° categories and grammatical case assignment in Finnish. Finnish, a heavily agglutinating language with a rich system of inflectional and derivational morphology, provides relevant data for testing predictions made by various proposals within Principles and Parameters-based syntactic frameworks, particularly Case Theory, Burzio's Generalization, and X-Bar Theory. One phenomenon which has recently attracted attention in the generative literature is the alternation in certain syntactic environments between animate pronouns in accusative case and full DP objects in nominative case, both of which may appear with partitive case morphology depending on sentential aspect and definiteness. The contexts where this alternation surfaces include impersonal passive, unaccusative, raising and imperative sentence types, where AGR fails to be coindexed with an external argument. This pattern of case assignment, where internal arguments of lexically or syntactically unaccusative verbs (i.e. single arguments of a one-place predicate) may or may not be case-coded as having the same grammatical function as objects of transitives, is typical of split-ergative (specifically Split-S) case systems. An analysis of split-ergativity is proposed which accounts for the phenomenon as the result
category grammatical case assignment finnish finnish heavily language rich system inflectional derivational_morphology provide relevant data test prediction make various proposal within_principles parameters based syntactic framework particularly case theory generalization bar theory phenomenon recently attract_attention generative literature alternation certain syntactic environment animate pronoun accusative case full object nominative case may appear partitive case morphology depend sentential aspect definiteness contexts alternation surface include impersonal passive unaccusative raise imperative sentence_type agr fail external argument pattern case assignment internal_argument lexically syntactically unaccusative verb single argument place predicate may_may case grammatical_function object transitive typical split specifically split case system analysis split propose account phenomenon