Re: Antigenetive case?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christian Thalmann" <cinga@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, August 09, 2002 4:06 AM
Subject: Re: Antigenetive case?


> --- In conlang@y..., Joe <joe@W...> wrote:
> > Has anyone thought of a case which marks a genetive, but marks it on the
> > posessed, not the posessor? I'll make up an example --
> >
> > In a demo language (not existing)
> > ie.
> >  kathai elom
> >  cat.AGN(f) 3s.ACC(m)
> >  cat-of him
> >   his cat
> >
> > AGN = anti genitive
> > 3s = Third person singualr
> > ACC =   Accusative.
>
>
> How do you mark grammatical case on this phrase?  If you were to
> say "His cat sees me" or "I see his cat" or "I give the cat some
> food", you'd have to mark nominative, accusative and dative cases
> on the phrase "his cat".  But the head noun (cat) already has a
> case, your antigenitive.
>
> Would you mark the global case on the describing word (in this example
> "he")?  That sounds quite couterintuitive to me.  You could add
> *both* case suffixes to the head noun, which is something I wouldn't
> like either, but it might work for you.  Some real-life languages
> stack cases IIRC.
>
> However, if you use the classical genitive construction, you can
> leave the head noun in its grammatical case and just tag the
> describing word with the genitive: "I give cat:DAT he:GEN some food".
>
> As for the name of antigenitive, it suggested something else to me
> at first sight...  I would expect cat:AGN man to mean "the man who
> possesses the cat" rather than "the cat possessed by the man".
Well, I think Christophe called it the Construct case...

I was just curious as if any Conalngs or Natlangs had it...