This volume presents an up-to-date cognitive-linguistic account of the Finnish cases that would serve the interests of an international audience. As the Finnish linguistic tradition has always considered grammatical cases to be meaningful elements, this volume also addresses the extensive work by earlier scholars from different theoretical backgrounds. The volume consists of an introduction and eleven articles. The introduction presents the system of Finnish cases and provides a brief overview of the main tenets of cognitive linguistics, offering guidance for those readers who are not familiar with cognitive linguistics. Some articles focus on one case and present a unified account of its functions, others analyse a larger group of cases that form a system (the local cases), whereas yet others address the use of cases in certain constructions (such as expressions of change). This collection of articles also discusses more general topics, such as the notion of case, questions of polysemy, the traditional division of cases into grammatical and semantic, the relationship between inflection and derivation, and the role of inflection in the categories of adpositions and adverbs.

This corpus study presents a comparative quantitative analysis of the partitive-accusative alternation of object case in five Finnic languages, using Bible texts. Objects of finite, non-finite and impersonal verbs are discussed. It includes a comparison of the use of case in written old Estonian and Finnish, tracing changes through to modern times, with some historical data also from Karelian, Livonian and Veps. The nominative-partitive alternation of copula complements and subjects in existential clauses is also analysed synchronically and diachronically. The review of relevant literature, much of which is in Finnish or Estonian, and explanatory introductions in all sections, are especially useful for those starting to study Finno-Ugric languages, but also for typologists and historical linguists.

Supporting evidence for this claim from several different languages is considered, the main analysis focusing on detailed studies of Hungarian and Finnish and the way in which they compare with English. Nothing in the Principles and Parameters approach to Case predicts the overlap between case and adpositions or the range and variability of cases. The existing possible solutions for such overlap have not been integrated into the standard approach to case. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap, proposing an integrated approach. The overlap of cases and adpositions is explained by their spelling out the same range of categories (P, D and Phi) in syntax, forming part of the extended projection of the noun, the difference being derived at the morphological level. The analyses presented focus largely on Hungarian and Finnish for detailed argumentation and exemplification of the mapping from syntax to morphology that would result in paradigms of syntactically non-equivalent objects.

While much attention has been devoted to simple nominal relators, especially prepositions and case markers, complex nominal relators have not yet been the focus of a systematic and cross-linguistic study. The chapters of this volume provide not only a working definition of such constructions, but also a description of complex adpositions and other complex nominal relators in a variety of European languages, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European, including some languages for which this phenomenon had received little attention, such as Breton and Albanian. Building on synchronic and diachronic corpus-based investigations, the authors show commonalities and specificities of these linguistic items across languages, trying to explain why and how they emerged. The research presented in this volume confirms the wide-spread use of complex adpositions in Europe, and the data reviewed in the final discussion suggests it might be the same in other parts of the world, as well. This book thus offers not only detailed descriptions of complex nominal relators in fifteen languages, but also indications of what to look for in other languages, and how to distinguish between a syntactically free sequence and a genuine complex nominal relator.

Adpositions lie at the core of the grammar of most languages, their usefulness making them recurrent in everyday speech and writing. Based on an analysis of 350 languages, this pioneering study examines their morphological features, syntactic functions, and semantic and cognitive properties.

The chapters of this volume scrutinize the interplay of different combinations of case, animacy and semantic roles, thus contributing to our understanding of these notions in a novel way. The focus of the chapters lies on showing how animacy affects argument marking. Unlike previous studies, these chapters primarily deal with lesser studied phenomena, such as animacy effects on spatial cases and the differences between cases and adpositions in the coding of spatial relations. In addition, theoretical and diachronic issues related to case and semantic roles are also discussed; for example, what is case, how do cases develop and what are the functional differences between cases and adpositions? The chapters deal with a variety of different languages including Uralic languages, Indo-European languages, Basque, Korean and Vaeakau-Taumako. The book is appealing to anyone interested in case, animacy and/or semantic roles.

The book provides a methodological blueprint for the study of constructional alternations – using corpus-linguistic methods in combination with different types of experimental data. The book looks at a case study from Estonian. This morphologically rich language is typologically different from Indo-European languages such as English. Corpus-based studies allow us to detect patterns in the data and determine what is typical in the language. Experiments are needed to determine the upper and lower limits of human classification behaviour. They give us an idea of what is possible in a language and show how human classification behaviour is susceptible to more variation than corpus-based models lead us to believe. Corpora and forced choice data tell us that when we produce language, we prefer one construction. Acceptability judgement data tell us that when we comprehend language, we judge both constructions as acceptable. The book makes a theoretical contribution to the what, why, and how of constructional alternations.

Based on data from a wide range of languages, the book discusses the ways in which case interacts with meaning.