Notes on Finnish Nonfinite Clauses * Paul Kiparsky Stanford University Dear Lauri: This brief description of the morphosyntax of Finnish nonfinite clauses does not meet your high standards of formalization and exhaustive data coverage, but I offer it in the hope that it will be an interim step towards one that does. I draw attention to the close match of the mor- phology of their participial and infinitival heads with their syntax, and to the sentential properties of propositional participial complements (referatiivinen lauseenvastike), which unlike other types of participial clauses have external arguments rather than nominal specifiers and verbal rather than adjectival heads. As always in Finnish syntax, structural cases play a big role in the analysis. I argue that they are decomposed into features which are defined at three levels of grammar. 1 Participles and Infinitives 1.1 The Morphological Data in Summary Finnish nonfinite verb forms assign case to their objects like finite verbs, but unlike finite verbs they they are inflected for case and have either genitive or controlled PRO subjects. Three con- vergent morphosyntactic criteria divide them into PARTICIPLES and INFINITIVES. 1 (1) Participles distinguish the verbal inflectional categories of voice and aspect, infinitives do not. (2) Partici- ples head nominalized clauses that function as heads of propositional complements and adjuncts, and of adjectival and adverbial modifiers (relative clauses), whereas infinitives head nominalized VPs, functioning as arguments when they bear direct cases, and as adjuncts when they bear bear oblique cases. (3) Participles can have overt subjects, marked with genitive case, while infinitive complements require obligatory control. (1) 1. Participles 2. Infinitives Functional verbal categories Voice and aspect No voice or aspect Syntactic function Adjectival or nominal Nominal Subject Genitive Obligatory control (PRO) Participles and infinitives can each be divided into two types, DIRECT and OBLIQUE, according to whether they bear structural case or oblique (“inherent”) case. DIRECT PARTICIPLES function as predicates and modifiers (non-finite relative clauses), and in addition head nonfinite proposi- tional clauses that function as direct arguments equivalent to finite that-clauses, gerunds, and ECM constructions. (2) shows the participle stems of tuo- ‘bring’. * A warm thank you to Ida Toivonen for her careful review, and to the editors for their patience. 1 See Manninen 2012 for arguments that these verb forms and the clauses that they head are nonfinite. 1