One sort of ANADEWy thing about Finnish is the case marking of the object, once you get down to the really fine-grained details. This post will first introduce the basic setup, and then go on with the worse bits.
The Finnish object case is determined in part by a semantic component, basically best illustrated by this schematic:
| telic | atelic |
| negative | part | part |
| affirmative | acc | part |
Telicity is akin to perfectivity, but not quite the same thing. In school, I was taught the term "resultative" rather than telic. Basically, it is telic if these two semantic conditions hold:
- the action is talked of as achieving or having achieved the intended result, and
- the result of the action is the thing we're focusing on, not the progress of the action itself.
The accusative has a further complication, and this complication is syntactically conditioned. First of all, the nominative and accusative are identical in the plural, which means that basically, this decision algorithm is unnecessary there.
In the singular, the accusative is identical to the genitive. (However, some sources state this as 'there's an accusative I and an accusative II, the first being identical to the genitive, the other to the nominative.) If the verb is passive, or the subject is not in the nominative, the object will instead be in the accusative-nominative.
The main syntactic deciding factor is whether a VP can have a nominative subject. This might sound like a weird thing not to have, but there are a few types of constructions where nominative subjects are not possible in Finnish: several modal auxiliaries are quirky case verbs, and thus take the subject in the genitive. Imperatives cannot take nominative subjects. Passives cannot take nominative subjects. There are also some iffy bits about infinitives.
The decision flow for object case runs:
1. is the statement telic and affirmative?
yes? ↓ no? ↳ partitive
2. is it possible to have a nominative subject for that particular VP?
no? ↓ yes? ↳ accusative (genitive if singular, nom-acc if plural)
accusative (nominative if singular, nom-acc if plural)
The schematic above omits the whole question of infinitives, but by and large it is accurate. One could add an extra branch for plurals before 2, simplifying the reasoning for plurals but adding one extra step whenever it's a singular. I figure having a uniform decision algorithm is better.
Here are some examples:
Erkki osti auton
Erkki buy-past(3sg) car.gen
Since the result here - obtaining the car - is sort of the central point, it's telic, and thus some form of accusative. Since Erkki is an overt nominative subject,
Erkki ostaa auton
Erkki buy-3sg car.gen
Erkki (will) buy a car – the telicity implies that we're talking about him actually completing the transaction.
katselen televisiota
watch-1sg television-part
I am watching television
A further complication resides in the personal pronouns ̣- they all have an accusative form that is more similar to the plural nominative-accusative than to the genitive. Let's compare the noun morphology for nom, gen, acc1, acc2 and plur nom for the pronouns "minä", "sinä" (me, you) and the noun "talo" (house). The plural nom/acc of 1sg and 2sg does not really exist for personal pronouns in Finnish, as the plurals are formed from separate roots.
| nom | gen | "acc 1" | "acc 2" | plur nom/acc |
|
| 1sg | minä | minun | minut | minut | n/a ("minut") |
| 2sg | sinä | sinun | sinut | sinut | n/a ("sinut") |
|
| 3pl | he | heidän | heidät | heidät | n/a ("heidät") |
|
| talo | talo | talon | talon | talo | talot |
|
However, it turns out that somehow, the minut/sinut/... forms underlyingly are genitives or nominatives- they trigger genitive or nominal adjectival congruence depending on which object form is expected. The pronoun 'who', kuka, which is rich in suppletion (kuka, kene-, ke- being the principal roots) can have both kuka and kenet for "acc2" objects. The congruence with genitive adjectives also "feeds back" and forces the pronoun itself get genitive marking, and congruence with nominative adjectives operates likewise.
More on this stuff can be found in Paul Kiparsky's
Structural Case in Finnish, a very thorough treatment of object and subject case in Finnish.
What we as conlangers can take away from this is the potential for a case with limited distribution to behave weirdly outside of that context: an interesting thing would be to have more lexemes behave like kuka/kene-/ke- as per above. Alternatively, like the minut/sinut/... forms, the congruence could indicate an underlying case distinction.
Another option that I sort of envisioned while reading this was to have the minut/sinut/... gamut be underlyingly genitive throughout the system, and having adjectives marked for the "wrong case forms". By "wrong case forms", I mean as per the decision algorithm given above. So, when that decision algorithm indicates the nominative/acc2 case, but an adjective appears with a pronoun that conflates acc1 and acc2, the adjective appears in the genitive - and maybe even better, have the kuka/kene-/ke- -like thing happen and force the entire phrase into the genitive.
There's probably even more weird things one could come up with.
