Adposition phrases in morphologically impoverished languages have a function
similar to nouns with morphological cases in morphologically rich languages,
leading some researchers to argue that at least some cases belong to the category
P. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether all cases can be analysed
as Ps. The focus is on partitive case in Finnish. Whilst the ‘local’
cases in many languages appear to be strong candidates for analysis as members
of the category P, it will be argued that partitive case (and genitive in languages
where there is no distinct partitive) spells out a functional head between P
and D, and that it properly belongs to the D-system (quantifiers or determiners),
not the P-system. Thus morphological cases do not form a coherent category in
syntax. Instead, morphological case paradigms relate to one of three different
syntactic items: (i) uninterpretable features (structural cases), (ii) PP structures
(cases expressing spatial or thematic relations), and (iii) determiner or quantifier
projections (partitive, and partitive uses of genitive). Possible extensions
of the analysis to other languages (German, Tongan and English) are explored.
Nordlyd: Tromsø Working Papers in Language and Linguistics 33.1