Re: all possible cases ;-)

In a message dated 10/17/01 12:07:37 AM, jaspax@JUNO.COM writes:

>> However when I was browsing my old notes on language
>> construction
>> I rediscovered an old attempt to build a "case-complete" language,
>> i.e. a
>> language that completely lacks constructs like 'going TO THE MARKET'
>> (lokativ)
>> or 'talking ABOUT SOMEBODY' and instead uses cases (sorry for the
>> lack of
>> linguistic terminology, the tiny bit I know is limited to the german
>> terms).
>> So the questions are:
>> Do you think this is possible?
>
>Yes.  In fact, I believe there are languages which actually do this or
>come very very close.
>
>> Does anybody know the largest number of cases occuring in a natural
>> language?
>
>I've heard 30 for some Caucasion language (which is more than Nik's 20
>reported cases).  I have no external way to verify that, though.
>
>To do this, you'll have to be selective, though--you can't hope to
>indicate *everything* that could conceivably be a preposition without
>including infinite affixes.  For example, what do you do with the concept
>"under the care of"?  In some language, somewhere, that concept is
>probably indicated with a morphologically simple preposition.  It would
>be absurd to have a case ending with that concept, so you'll have to come
>up with a paraphrasis--perhaps "care" in the instrumental followed by the
>object in the partitive.  From a certain point of view, that will be a
>preposition, but most analyses wouldn't support that.
Hmmm ... why are you considering "under the care of" a preposition? I mean
all languages have their little idiosyncracies ... some also have a single
preposition for "at the house of," but some languages clearly don't. If you
you analyze the English versions as some type of complex prepositions,
wouldn't it also follow that "on the forty-second page of the book that I'm
reading for" is also a preposition? It's more extreme but it follows the same
principles.

I would call these things partial prepositional phrases, which would be
completed when you add a noun at the end. Unlike English prepositions, "under
the care of" has its own internal structure. If, say, we add "the elders" at
the end, we can analyze it better: "of" is a preposition which combines with
the noun phrase "the elders" to make a PP, and then the PP modifies the noun
phrase "the care" just as an adjective or relative clause would ... and
finally "the care of the elders" has a P before it, to make another PP.
(forgive me, I just just finished my take-home syntax midterm so my head is
swimming with phrases and tree diagrams and everything.... :-) )

The way I see it ... there is a closed class of adpositions, and case endings
also make up a closed class, and they perform the same function, so there's
no reason why one set couldn't replace the other. You could use cases and
have something like "the care-under the elders-of" - and if you want of
course you could indicate somehow that "the elders-of" modifies the word
before it, as opposed to being on the same level as it.

>BTW, this is what my language, Yivríndil does with some concepts:
>*delaosí a'ennarodi*, "agreement-DAT GEN-clan leaders" "with the
>agreement of the clan leaders."  Here, the word *delaosí* is a fixed
>idiomatic use of the dative to indicate the quasi-prepositional concept
>shown in the English gloss.
>
>
>
>Jesse S. Bangs     Pelíran
>jaspax@ juno.com
>"There is enough light for those that desire only to see, and enough
>darkness for those of a contrary disposition."  --Blaise Pascal
Josh Roth
members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html

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