Structural Case Assignment and Phi-Agreement in Finnish 1

Abstract Structural Case assignment, agreement in phi-features, and the EPP-movement are related to each other. However, their exact syntactic relationship remains controversial. The matter is examined here from the point of view of Finnish morphosyntax. Finnish provides close to an ideal language for this purpose, as it has fifteen case forms and full syntactic phi-agreement on verbs (finite and nonfinite), nouns, adjectives and prepositions. In addition, Finnish exhibits certain more exotic Case assignment phenomena, among them the long distance Case assignment, quantificational Case and aspectual Case. It is argued that the recent minimalist theory of Agree provides a sound starting point to explain the phenomena, but requires certain modifications to fully capture the Finnish facts. Specifically, it will be argued that Case is not a reflex of an uninterpretable phi-set probe, as posited in the standard theory, but, instead, it is a reflex of a more abstract phi-specification feature of functional heads. In addition, locality restrictions on Agree posited in the standard theory are argued to be too strong