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Re: THEORY: "Quirky" Case -- "Quirky" Subjects and "Quirky" Objects

From:Thomas Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Friday, July 29, 2005, 17:29
Tom wrote:
> QUESTIONS: > 1a) How many, and what, cases can grammatically be given to the > Subject?
In my experience, virtually any case can be assigned to the grammatical subject (assuming, of course, the language has a subject function).
> 1b) What language holds the record for most cases the Subject > can have? What is the record?
It's sometimes difficult to tell, since most people are not very clear what they mean by 'subject'. There are formal tests to determine what the subject is, and in many cases the topicalized nonnominative argument does not have these properties despite being in 'subject position'. For example, it is my understanding that in the German sentence, the dative argument of _gefallen_ 'to please' cannot control reflexivization: (a) Mir gefaellt das Buch. 'I like the book' (b) *Ihm gefaellt sich. 'He likes himself' So, although there are plenty of languages with topicalized dative, genitive, or instrumental arguments (e.g. Russian), it's not clear that these languages have so many nonnominative subjects.
> 2a) How many, and what, cases can grammatically be given to the Object? > 2b) What language holds the record for most cases the Object can > have? What is the record?
In my experience, languages are far freer in assigning lexical case to objects than to subjects. As such, it seems more likely to closely track the language that has the most cases overall, which would be Tabassaran IIRC. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637