The Nominative Object in Slavic, Baltic, and West Finnic

Structural case in finnish

“…Recent work has completely upset this traditional view of the Finnish structural case system. Reviving an early proposal by Jahnsson 1871, many linguists now regard the so-called "endingless accusative" simply as a nominative (Timberlake 1974, Taraldsen 1985, Milsark 1986, Mitchell 1991, Maling 1993, Toivainen 1993, Vilkuna 1996, Nelson 1998. A minority fold the -n accusative with the genitive into one case (Penttilä 1963:149, Vilkuna 1989:7, Vainikka 1993 2 ).…”

Passives and impersonals

“…15 Impersonal voice is expressed by no/to forms in a Sprachbund that covers Poland and the Ukraine and extends through the Baltics and along the northern Russian territories discussed in Timberlake 1974Timberlake , 1976.…”

Internally conditioned language change: The development of the North Russian -no/-to perfect

“…II: 1508-1521 See section 1.1. for a brief enumeration of the subject syntactic properties. For a more detailed discussion of each property with concrete North Russian examples, see Timberlake (1976). 10 All Russian dialects including North Russian utilize another oblique subject construction.…”

“…The establishment of the construction < u + Gen + -no/-to + Nom > by the 16 th c. gave rise to a new impersonal environment, in which the Nom patient phrase must have been subject to the so-called 'Nom object rule', which was active in North Russian until the 17 th c. As shown in the comprehensive investigation of the North Russian nominative object construction (zemlja paxat' 'it is to plow the land') by Timberlake (1974), in systemically impersonal constructions such as the infinitive and the gerund, direct objects are assigned the Nom instead of the Acc. The Nom assignment to the object was subject to a number of constraints, including animacy, which restricts the Nom assignment to inanimate nouns and assigns the Acc case to animate nouns and personal pronouns.…”