"Deficient" Case Marking System of the Finnish Language

Abstract

The Finnish language has three morphological cases that are available for core arguments. These three cases are the nominative, the genitive and the partitive. They do not have one-to-one relation to grammatical functions each core argument carries on. Although the Finnish language is abundant in morphological cases, the case marking system of core arguments seems to be partially deficient. However, the case assignment to core arguments can be straightforwardly explained by regarding the nominative as the default case for quantitatively definite arguments. The nominative case is assigned to all the core arguments that are quantitatively definite, irrespective of their grammatical function. Next, if there are both the subject and the object in one and the same clause, the nominative case of the object alternates with the genitive case. As for the syntactic interpretation, a nominative argument is interpreted as the subject by default. This is because the nominative is the case for the highest argument on the hierarchy of the grammatical functions. It can be regarded as the object only when the sentence in question does not have a subject. On the other hand, an argument marked in the genitive case is interpreted as the object except when it is followed by a non-finite predicate. This is because the genitive is the case available for dependents.