The Independence of Case and Inner Aspect

This paper argues that case and inner aspect are independent syntactic relations. In particular I argue that there is no direct syntactic relation between the appearance of accusative case on the direct object and a telic interpretation of a predicate. I argue that accusative case is an Agree relation with v° and aspect is an Agree relation with Asp°, an aspectual head between vP and VI responsible for syntactically instantiating a mapping from the object to the event. Passives, unaccusatives and statives provide support for this conclusion. This conclusion has consequences for the structure of Finnish, which has been put forth as a language that manifests a direct syntactic relation between case and aspect. I provide an analysis in which there is no direct syntactic relation between case and aspect in Finnish.