Re: OT: sorta OT: cases: please help...

Quoting David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:

> In a message dated 12/5/01 3:25:12 PM, faceloran@JUNO.COM writes:
> << >here are some of the examples my polish professor gave us:
> >'i write with a pen'... ok that works 'pen' is in the instrumental
> >case, but the next example is: 'i am a student'... huh? what?
> >wouldn't both 'i' and 'student' be nominative?
>
> You are a student, but *you* are doing the action--being--and *student*
> is receiving it. Whatever does the action is nominative, and whatever
> receives it is accusative. >>
>
>     That's a fine way of explaining why "student" is in the accusative
> and "I" is in the nominative in the sentence "I am a student".  Wonderful.
> So now explain why "student" is in the instrumental, not in the accusative
> or nominative, which was the original question, O greater understander of
> languages.
Right.  Maybe I've missed the context here, but whoever it was who wrote
that above should disabuse themselves of the notion that case must
somehow always map onto a permanent grid of semantic relations.  Here's
proof. In English, you can say all of the following:

 (1) a. He(A) saw her(P).
     b. She(A) saw him(P).
 (2) a. I believed him(A) to have seen her(P).
     b. I believed her(P) to have been seen by him(A).

Sentences (1a) and (b) are very straightforward, as they prove that
semantic agents (marked as (A)) can receive nominative case, and in
fact often do.  The sentences in (2), however, show that they need
not *always* mark nominative case.  (2a) and (2b) both have both an
agent and a patient, but in both sentences, both the agent and the
patient are marked with accusative case.  This is a fact of English
that simply cannot be ignored.

That having been said, there are languages whose "case" markers are
fundamentally tied to semantic relations (I'm thinking Tibetan is
like this, but I may be misremembering).  These languages could,
for example, mark all of the agents above with the ergative case,
wherever they happen to be, and mark absolutive all the patients.
FWIW, the language I'm thinking of also does not *require* these
markers, so that may also be an important point.

> <<Hey, I might not know the fancy notation, but I know a lot more about
> the workings of language than some of you do.>>
>
>     Was this a joke?  I'd think it's generally not polite to insult
> someone for asking a question.
Indeed.


=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
                     "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
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