Dates listed here indicate the most recent substantive revision.
Later dates which may appear on the papers themselves reflect only minor correction of errors and the like. The paper begins by examining the role of Case in syntactic theory and follows an idea of Alec Marantz to simplify matters by eliminating abstract Case as a licensing condition on DPs, leaving a theory of theta roles based on the work of Hale and Keyser on the projection of argument structure, and a notion of Case as a purely morphological category. A program of research is then laid out to examine this hypothesis and to account for the realizations of Case that we find within a particular brand of the theory of Distributed Morphology. The second part of the paper begins this research with a case study on the Finno-Ugric languages Mordvin, Mari and Finnish, which show very interesting patterns of CASE marking variation that will have implications for any theory. To appear in D. W. Lightfoot, ed. 2002.