Re: CHAT: Prepositions governing nominative,(X)... case [was Re: CHAT: Back on the list; Anti-conlangingbigots]

Quoting Matthew Kehrt <matrix14@...>:

> How much sense does it make to have the nominative and accusative
> marked, but the genetive unmarked?
> i.e., Eviendadhail:
> idan - man NOM
> edan - man ACC
> dan - man gen
Hmm. I don't have a clear example, but in Atakapa, you certainly
can get constructions that do not mark genitives at all:

  (1)  ha tal
       he skin
       'his skin'
  (2)  icak kaû  añ
       man  dead house
       'a dead man's house'
  (3)  yûkhiti icak kaû  ha tal
       Indian  man  dead he skin
       'a dead Indian man's skin'

The question here, of course, is whether Atakapa also marks
nominative and accusative.  I don't have any data on that,
but I suspect that you could get away with it.  Russian,
for example, has a null ending in the genitive plural of
some nouns (nom. sg. _?kola_, gen. pl. _?kol_), but has
distinct nominative and accusative markers on those same
nouns.

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Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

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