Re: What defines the case name?

On Sat, 15 Dec 2001 20:31:01 +0300, Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...> wrote:

>S'mae,
>Ysgrifennodd Joe Hill:
>
>>Just wondering, I've been reading up on georgian and it uses the dative as
>direct object, so what defines a certain case?
>
>Tradition, or the prejudices of whoever was the first to describe the
>language.
I don't think it's *that* stupid.

In fact, morphological cases have more than one semantic/syntactical roles
attributed to each of them in all languages that have cases.

Having a separate name for each attested case-role combination would
potentiate the number of case names used in the literature - which is
already frightening.

So, IMO one can safely call "dative" any case that shares some main roles
of cases called "datives" in a few well-known languages.

And IMO, it is methodologically safer to consider the nomenclature of
"roles" ("underlying cases", "semantical cases", etc.) a metalanguage
issue, rather than something ontological.


Basilius
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