Alan Timberlake

The nominative object in finnish

predictable from the surface grammatical relations of a sentence. Thus the grammatical subject is the NP directly dominated by the S node, and it is specified as nominative; the object is the NP directly domi-, nated by the VP node, and it is specified as accusative (Chomsky 1965: 221-2). When the semantic object is in fact specified as nominative, it must first have become the grammatical subject through the operation of a transformation which modifies grammatical relations, as for example the passive or raising. Finnish contradicts these assumptions in an interesting way, by using the nominative to specify the object in certain environments. This unexpected use of the nominative for object is the topic of this paper.*

Natural Language Motivations for Extending Categorial Grammar

The purpose of this paper is to present a variety of linguistically significant generalizations that can naturally be represented within a specific version of categorial grammar we propose below. These generalizations are given in Sections 2–4. Section 1 introduces the specific form of categorial grammar we use, and Section 5 concludes with a tentative suggestion for a formal universal of natural language based on the empirically motivated work of the preceding sections.