Long distance Case assignment and intervention

Abstract

A common assumption in linguistic theory is that structural Case assignment constitutes a clause-bound, local dependency. Finnish Case assignment is at odds with any such analysis. Here, structural Case assignment penetrates non-finite clause boundaries, adjunct-adverbial boundaries and even noun heads. What constraints such wild behavior has remained a mystery. This article finds that Finnish structural Case assignment is constrained by a peculiar kind of intervention/relativized minimality condition. A distinction between full intervention, where complete feature set is involved, and partial intervention, where only a subset of the relevant features are involved, finds support in our analysis. Starke's (2001) multi-feature intervention analysis will be developed to explain the phenomenon. In addition, the Chomsky–Hiraiwa Multiple-Agree hypothesis finds strong support in this work, but the theory of phases and Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) does not.