Abstract
Finnish has both nominative and genitive objects. The two cases are normally in a complementary distribution based on the local syntactic context (Jahnsson’s Rule). The pattern breaks down in nonfinite clauses where the conditioning is non-local and the cases may occur in free variation. This puzzling pattern can be understood if we make the following assumptions: (i) structural case distinguishes the external argument from other arguments; (ii) structural case assignment is cyclic. In our optimality-theoretic analysis the choice of case is determined by the interaction of markedness constraints that apply cyclically and faithfulness constraints that protect case assigned on prior cycles. Non-locality arises because faithfulness is violable; free variation arises because constraint conflicts can be resolved in multiple ways. In addition to categorical well-formedness contrasts the analysis predicts degrees of well-formedness in cases of free variation.
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Notes
Abbreviations: acc ‘accusative’, act ‘active’, ela ‘elative’, gen ‘genitive’, imp ‘imperative’, ine ‘inessive’, nom ‘nominative’, p ‘person’, par ‘partitive’, pass ‘passive’, past ‘past tense’, perf ’perfective aspect’, pl ‘plural’, pres ‘present/imperfective aspect’, px ‘possessive suffix’, sg ‘singular’.
The terminology surrounding Finnish structural case is somewhat confusing. One common view posits an abstract accusative (acc) which is morphologically realized as zero (acc/∅) homophonous with the nominative and as -n (acc/n) homophonous with the genitive; see, e.g., Vainikka and Brattico (2014). In this paper, we take the view that the zero accusative is the nominative (see, e.g., Jahnsson 1871, and subsequently Timberlake 1974; Milsark 1985; Taraldsen 1985; Mitchell 1991; Maling 1993; Toivainen 1993; Nelson 1998; Kiparsky 2001) and the -n accusative is the genitive (see, e.g., Penttilä 1963; Vainikka 1989; Kiparsky 2001).
The statement in (5) cannot be found as such in Jahnsson’s book. What we do find is a statement that the presence of a subject matters to making the object accusative (Jahnsson 1871: 10) and the absence of a “personal” subject matters to making it nominative (Jahnsson 1871: 14). Jahnsson’s Rule is problematic if taken as an inviolable constraint (see Vainikka and Brattico 2014), but what is correct about it can be captured in terms of violable constraints, as we will see shortly.
Any statement of Jahnsson’s Rule must mention two special cases. First, human pronouns have a dedicated accusative form that is insensitive to the presence vs. absence of subject, e.g., Ota minu-t take.imp 1p.sg-acc ‘Take me!’ Second, plural objects are always realized in the unmarked nominative, e.g., Matti ampui karhu-t Matti.shot bear-pl.nom ‘Matti shot the bears’. Both will be set aside here.
Certain adverbs of duration, measure, and frequency also receive structural case and behave more or less like objects, e.g., Pekka nukkui tunni-n ‘Pekka slept an hour-gen’, Kala painoi kilo-n ‘The fish weighed a kilo-gen’, Pekka luki kirja-n kerra-n ‘Pekka read the book-gen once-gen’; see, e.g., Maling (1993). However, adverbs allow variation not found in argument case. For discussion of adverb case and an optimality-theoretic analysis, see Anttila and Kim (2011).
A reviewer notes that the harmonically bounded candidate *gen nom with marked case on the subject and unmarked case on the object resembles the pattern in ergative languages, raising the question of how they would be analyzed. The reviewer suggests two possible solutions: (i) Ergative is inherent; see, e.g., Woolford (2006), Anand and Nevins (2006), Legate (2008), and McFadden (2009). Under this view, the ergative case would be protected by faithfulness to inherent case; (ii) Ergative is structural, see, e.g., Marantz (1991) and Baker (2014). Under this view, one could propose an additional constraint *mc/i ‘Do not case-mark an internal argument’ and ergative and accusative languages would be distinguished based on how this constraint is ranked relative to the others. We leave the choice between these two alternatives open.
A reviewer inquires about the analysis of human pronouns. The basic generalization is that human pronouns are acc as internal arguments: Minä näin sinu-t ‘I saw you-acc’ (active transitive); Sinu-t nähtiin ‘You-acc were seen’ (passive transitive); Minu-lla on sinu-t ‘I have you-acc’ (lit., ‘On me is you’, possessive); cf. Minä olen hän ‘I am he.nom’ (predicative). This generalization could be stated as an undominated constraint. For the potential exception of unaccusatives, see Nelson (1998: 83–84). Not all human pronouns are alike. For example, joku ‘someone’ behaves like a lexical noun in terms of case, e.g., Minä näin jo-n-ku-n ‘I saw someone-gen’ (active transitive); Joku nähtiin ‘Someone.nom was seen’ (passive transitive); Minu-lla on joku ‘I-ade have someone.nom’ (possessive). We will return to the case marking of joku briefly below. The differential case marking of pronouns vs. lexical nouns is a complex problem that we cannot satisfactorily solve here; for an OT approach, see Aissen (2003).
An optimality-theoretic grammar can be defined as a set of ordered pairs R in the constraint set C, i.e., as a binary relation in C. In Classical Optimality Theory R is irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive, and connected. Partial Order Optimality Theory omits the connectedness assumption, see, e.g., Anttila and Cho (1998/2003). An introduction to ordering can be found in Partee et al. (1993: 39–53); for a formalization of Partial Order Optimality Theory, see Djalali (2014).
The reverse does not hold: there are many sets of total orders that are not partial orders. For example, the set {1, 6} is not a partial order.
A reviewer inquires about the empty grammar at the top of the diagram. The empty grammar allows any possible ranking of the three constraints, but that does not mean it allows any possible output pattern. In the case of (20), the empty grammar predicts variation in transitive clauses (nom gen ∼ nom nom), but no variation in existential (ine nom) or predicative (nom nom) clauses. This is like actual Finnish except that it allows nom ∼ gen variation on direct objects. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such native dialect, but it might well be the dialect of a second language speaker whose first language lacks case inflection. Assuming that constraints are universal and rankings language-particular, the empty grammar is what a child brings into the world before exposure to language data. Such a grammar permits extensive variation, but in a way tightly constrained by Universal Grammar. In particular, the predicted dialect conforms to all the implicational universals that follow from these constraints, as discussed in Sect. 3.4.
The following underlying forms may be assumed: the voice morphemes are /-∅/ ‘active’ and /-ttA/ ‘passive’; the aspect morphemes are /-vA/ ‘present’, /-nee/ ‘perfect’, /ttA-vA/ ‘passive, present’, and /-tU/ ‘passive, perfect’. The case morpheme is invariably /-n/ ‘genitive’.
A reviewer asks about possible interpretational or structural differences between nom and gen. We have the explicit affirmation of Hakulinen and Karlsson (1975: 339): “No meaning difference is associated with the morphological difference between [genitive] and [nominative] […].” Itkonen (1981: 105) discusses one potential difference, the influence of prescriptive rules, but dismisses it as irrelevant. We will see that the choice between nom and gen is largely predictable. If there were some unidentified structural difference involved, the evidence would simply show that the choice between the two structures is largely predictable.
Interrogative pronouns and topicalized NPs appear to be different. Itkonen (1981: 115–116) notes that gen is preferred in cases like Kene-n [hän sanoi vieraa-n olevan t]? who-gen [he.nom said guest-gen be-act.pres-gen t] ‘Who did he say the guest to be?’ Yhtä hullu-n [minä luulen hänen olevan t kuin ennenkin] as crazy-gen [I believe he-gen be-act.pres-gen t as before] ‘I believe him to be as crazy as ever.’ It is not clear to us what to make of this pattern.
This proposal is anticipated in Hakulinen and Karlsson (1975: 345). For Itkonen, the data provided evidence against the transformational grammar of the day: he pointed out that his generalization would presuppose peculiar “sideways derivations” where output structures communicate with one another.
Itkonen’s criterion for “favoring nom” was defined as choosing nom in at least 7 sentences out of 8; the rest were grouped as “not favoring nom.” He appears to have chosen the cutoff point with an eye towards making the two groups approximately the same size (Itkonen 1981: 110); here both groups have 63 subjects.
Human pronouns take acc even here: Se oli tilaisuus tavata häne-t ‘It was an opportunity to meet him/her-acc.’ We noted above that joku ‘someone’ behaves like a common noun in terms of case, but internet searches turn up examples like Sanotaan, että häät ovat paras tilaisuus tavata jo-n-ku-n ‘It is said that a wedding is the best opportunity to meet someone-gen’ where joku takes gen inside a predicative, although nom is also found. We find no such examples in our corpus. While we have no satisfactory explanation to offer it is probably not a coincidence that these gen examples involve a human pronoun.
It turns out that tableau (89) contains all the information needed to infer the full ranking for Finnish. This means that datum (88) allows the learner to infer all the case patterns discussed above, including the quantitative patterns in Itkonen’s data.
The graph includes one prediction that cannot be tested given the available data: gen should be less frequent in active-NP[transitive] (an Ikola structure) than in active[existential] (an Itkonen structure). Our data are not appropriate for checking this prediction: the Itkonen data come from an experiment conducted in the mid-1970’s; the Ikola data come from a newspaper published a quarter century later.
We also tested Ikola’s hypothesis by defining pair frequency as the frequency of the 167 adjacent verb + noun pairs in the full Aamulehti 1999 corpus. The results were similar. The advantage of this alternative measure is the larger spread of frequencies; the disadvantage is that the full Aamulehti 1999 corpus was not manually checked and the data contain plenty of noise due to homonymy and ambiguity.
Vainikka and Brattico assume that Finnish has an abstract accusative with three morphological variants: the /-t/-accusative which only occurs on human pronouns (acc/t), the zero accusative which is homophonous with the nominative (acc/∅), and the /-n/ accusative which is homophonous with the genitive (acc/n). In keeping with our usage in the present paper, we will call the latter two nom and gen, respectively.
The variation in Ikola structures is noted by Brattico (2012: 277): “if the matrix verb shows full phi-features, both the n-accusative [= gen] and ∅-accusative [= nom] are possible inside the object NP.” Here Brattico invokes a Telescopic Object Principle: “Long distance case assignment between a probe and a goal takes place only if the goal is a direct object.”
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Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited from presentations at the 12th Korea-Japan Workshop on Linguistics and Language Processing (Seoul, March 24, 2012), the Stanford Syntax and Morphology Circle (March 14, 2013), the Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle (April 10, 2013), the Structure of Finnish seminar at Stanford University (Winter Quarter 2014), the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon (January 8, 2015), and the Workshop on the Formal Structure of OT Typologies, Rutgers University (May 29, 2015). We thank Mark Baker, Pauli Brattico, Joan Bresnan, Alex Djalali, Vivienne Fong, Vera Gribanova, Jane Grimshaw, Boris Harizanov, Heidi Harley, Tarja Heinonen, Cameron Jeffers, Peter Jenks, Elsi Kaiser, Lauri Karttunen, Paul Kiparsky, Victor Kuperman, Joan Maling, Line Mikkelsen, Ethan Poole, Alan Prince, Shigeo Tonoike, Anne Vainikka, Maria Vilkuna, the editors of NLLT, and three anonymous reviewers whose extremely helpful comments improved the paper significantly in both content and presentation. We are responsible for any errors. The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of Kyung Hee University during his term as an International Scholar (April 2011–March 2012). If not otherwise stated, the well-formedness judgments are those of the first author. We dedicate this paper to the memory of Osmo Ikola (1918–2016), a pioneer in Finnish syntax, whose work was an inspiration for us.
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Appendices
Appendix A: The Ikola corpus
The Ikola corpus contains 1,577 sentences extracted from Aamulehti 1999, an electronic document collection of the Finnish language containing 16.6 million words, available through CSC IT Center for Science Ltd (csc.fi), administered by the Finnish Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. For more information, see kielipankki.fi/language-bank.
The corpus was built by the first author in three steps: (i) by extracting the trigrams noun + infinitive + {nom, gen} from the corpus using the Lemmie interface (3,814 sentences), replaced since by the Korp interface (korp.csc.fi); (ii) by narrowing down the result to sentences that exemplify the structure under study (1,577 sentences); (iii) by annotating the result for several variables. The trigram was selected to maximize the number of desired hits and to minimize the number of spurious hits, while keeping the result small enough for human inspection. Two steps in the process involved human judgment: in step (ii) the result of the automatic search was narrowed down to sentences that exemplify the structure under study; in step (iii) the examples were annotated for eleven variables deemed relevant: matrix subject, matrix voice, matrix polarity, matrix verb, noun case, noun number, noun stem, infinitive stem, embedded object/predicative case, syntactic ambiguity, and argument structure. The annotated corpus, the exclusion criteria used in step (ii), and the annotation guidelines used in step (iii) are available from the authors upon request.
Examples of search commands are given in (130); examples of search results (slightly simplified) are given in (131) and (132).
-
(130)
[bf=“lupa”][modality=“Iinf”][case=“Nom”]
Hits: 134
[bf=“lupa”][modality=“Iinf”][case=“Gen”]
Hits: 130
-
(131)
-
(132)
In the seach trigram noun + infinitive + {nom, gen} the term noun targets a noun lexeme, e.g., lupa ‘permit’, in any of its inflectional forms. We focused on the 28 noun lexemes mentioned in Ikola (1964) of which 24 occurred in our search results: aie ‘intention’, aihe ‘topic’, aika ‘time’, ajatus ‘thought’, halu ‘desire’, himo ‘lust’, käsky ‘command’, kyky ‘ability’, lupa ‘permit’, lupaus ‘promise’, mahdollisuus ‘possibility’, oikeus ‘right’, onni ‘luck’, päätös ‘decision’, pyrkimys ‘aspiration’, suunnitelma ‘plan’, tahto ‘will’, tapa ‘manner’, tarve ‘need’, tehtävä ‘task’, vaara ‘danger’, vaikeus ‘difficulty’, velvollisuus ‘obligation’, yritys ‘attempt’. The search term infinitive targets any 1st infinitive immediately following the noun, e.g., rakentaa ‘build’. Finally, the search term {nom, gen} targets any word in the nominative or genitive case immediately following the infinitive.
Appendix B: Summary of predicted case patterns
trans | nom gen | Matti ampui karhu-n. ‘Matti shot a bear.’ |
pred | nom nom | Matti on sotilas. ‘Matti is a soldier.’ |
exist | ine nom | Metsässä on karhu. ‘There’s a bear in the forest.’ |
act[trans] | nom [gen gen] | Pekka uskoi Matin ampuneen karhu-n. ‘Pekka believed Matti to have shot a bear.’ |
act[pred] | nom [gen nom ∼ gen] | Pekka uskoi Matin olevan sotilas∼sotilaa-n. ‘Pekka believed Matti to be a soldier.’ |
act[exist] | nom [ine nom ∼ gen] | Pekka uskoi metsässä olevan karhu∼karhu-n. ‘Pekka believed there to be a bear in the forest.’ |
pass[trans] | [gen nom ∼ gen] | Matin uskottiin ampuneen karhu∼karhu-n. ‘Matti was believed to have shot a bear.’ |
pass[pred] | [gen nom ∼ gen] | Matin uskottiin olevan sotilas∼sotilaa-n. ‘Matti was believed to be a soldier.’ |
pass[exist] | [ine nom ∼ gen] | Metsässä uskottiin olevan karhu∼karhu-n. ‘There was believed to be a bear in the forest.’ |
act-NP[trans] | nom gen [nom ∼ gen] | Matti sai tilaisuuden ampua karhu∼karhu-n. ‘Matti got an opportunity to shoot a bear.’ |
act-NP[pred] | nom gen [nom] | Matti sai tilaisuuden olla sankari. ‘Matti got an opportunity to be a hero.’ |
pass-NP[trans] | nom [nom] | Saatiin tilaisuus ampua karhu. ‘An opportunity to shoot a bear was obtained.’ |
pass-NP[pred] | nom [nom] | Saatiin tilaisuus olla sankari. ‘An opportunity to be a hero was obtained.’ |
subj-NP[trans] | nom-[nom] | Tilaisuus ampua karhu tarjoutui. ‘An opportunity to shoot a bear presented itself.’ |
pred-NP[trans] | nom nom-[nom] | Se oli tilaisuus ampua karhu. ‘It was an opportunity to shoot a bear.’ |
subj-NP[pred] | nom-[nom] | Tilaisuus olla sankari tarjoutui. ‘An opportunity to be a hero presented itself.’ |
pred-NP[pred] | nom nom-[nom] | Se oli tilaisuus olla sankari. ‘It was an opportunity to be a hero.’ |
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Anttila, A., Kim, JB. Locality and variation in Finnish structural case. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 35, 581–634 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-016-9352-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-016-9352-x