The Finnish accusative: Long-distance case assignment under agreement

One of the two object cases in Finnish, the accusative, has three variants. One of these is a pronoun form similar to the English accusative. The choice between the remaining two forms is based on a number of syntactic properties. Here we show that the correct generalization needs to refer to the agreement features of the noun itself, c-command, and agreement higher in the structure. Moreover, it will be shown that the two accusative forms instantiate long distance case assignment, namely a system in which the case assigner may be situated in a position arbitrarily far from the assignee. Despite the several interacting mechanisms which take part in determining the accusative form in Finnish, we present a simple system of grammatical Case assignment that allows us to account for the three-way accusative realization as a by-product of more general syntactic mechanisms. At the core of our explanation is a notion of last resort: under certain exceptional conditions, higher functional heads, such as C and Agr, participate in direct object Case marking in order to save the derivation from crashing. The results suggest that the system of structural case/Case in UG needs to be broadened in order to capture all of the observed phenomena.