Morphological case and interpretation

There are a variety of approaches to case alternation in Finnish, including Vainikka 1989, Nelson 1998, Kiparsky 1998, 2001, and Kratzer 2004. These offer an account of the alternation between partitive and other structural cases (acc/nom) on nominals. The majority of the proposals focuses on a subset of the environments where case alternation is attested. I propose a Minimalist account which covers all environments, providing a natural description of partitive case. Case marking in Finnish: The basics. Abstract and morphological case (see Legate 2008) must be sharply distinguished in a successful account of case in Finnish. I assume that abstract case is licensed as usual in earlier Minimalist treatments (e.g. in Chomsky 2001), by checking the [Case] feature of the DP. Subject [Case] is licensed (= checked) by T and object [Case] by v, both in the syntactic component. Morphological case (m-case) is determined in the postsyntactic morphological component, which I assume to be sensitive to compositionally determined semantic properties. The relevant semantic property is divisibility, a type of homogeneity, since partitive case arises within divisible domains. Roughly, a predicate P is divisible iff whenever P(x), then for all y ⊆ x, P(y). For instance, either a divisible eventuality (more precisely, a vP, loving x in (1a)) or a divisible object (apples in (1b)) can yield partitive m-case on the object: