syntax nelson , diane carlita ; grammatical case assignment in finnish ; 0-8153 - 3180 - 0 , cloth ; pages , $ 65 ; garland publishing ; outstanding dissertations in linguistics this study presents an analysis of patterns of morphological case in finnish within the principles and parameters framework . finnish has a rich system of inflection for both case and agreement , making it an important language for testing hypotheses about the relationships between morphological case and abstract case , and case / case and agreement . the focus of the study is a set of syntactic environments where internal dp arguments appear in nominative case , but alternate with accusative pronouns . in the same contexts , internal arguments may also receive partitive case to encode features related to aspect or indefiniteness . because these environments lack an external argument coindexed with agreement , the data is particularly relevant to predictions made by burzio 's generalization . by testing burzio 's hypothesis systematically against a range of sentence types , finnish is shown to contain an ergative case subsystem within a nominative-accusative main system . the assignment of the objective cases is linked with the licensing of aspectual roles at d - structure , and finite tense is posited as a bi-unique case assigner . the case split then arises as the result of two case features being assigned simultaneously to an internal argument , objective case at d - structure associated with aspect , and nominative case at s - structure associated with finite tense where an external argument is not available . morphological spell-out rules for particular argument types are proposed which determine the surface case realization of doubly-case assigned nominals . e - mail : info @ garland . com