On structural case in Finnish and Korean

The Case Tier Hypothesis (CTH, Yip, Maling, and Jackendoff, 1987) accounts for the distribution of nominative and accusative in Finnish and Korean remarkably well, but a number of outstanding puzzles remain. We reformulate the CTH in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004), showing that the new proposal covers all the standard data and extends to several previously problematic phenomena, such as multiple nominatives and case variation in adverbials. After analyzing the core case patterns of Finnish and Korean, we go beyond these two languages and work out the general typological predictions of our proposal. This reveals what the theory admits and what it excludes, two central questions in theoretical linguistics.