Abstract
The Finnish language has a very complicated system for indicating the grammatical relations. What is involved in this case marking system are the nominative, the genitive and the partitive case. In the singular, Finnish has a tripartite system consisting of these three cases, by which two sets of oppositions can be represented at the same time. One of them is the opposition between subjects and objects , and the other is the opposition between definite and indefinite objects. The tripartite system is incomplete, however, since these three cases are not one-to-one correspondence with the grammatical relations they indicate. Moreover, it is not so infrequent that a subject and an object of the same sentence are indicated in the same case, especially in colloquial and dialectal speech. It is indeed true, however, that a subject and an object can be readily distinguished from each other on the basis of discourse information, even if they are not morphologically differentiated. This means that a differential marking of subjects and objects is not necessarily essential to the human languages.
Published Version
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