Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

Hi!

> What I meant is that you are assuming that "case" can exist
> apart from some actual construction or form in the language.
...
> This is precisely what Ray and I have been arguing against: that
> such a thing as case is "abstract" rather than overt.
Ok, I think I understand.  'case' is the morphological way of marking
which nouns belongs into which argument slot of a verb.  Word order is
a different way, postpositions yet another.  Is that right?  This
operation as such has no standard name, but maybe 'argument
assignment' may be appropriate.

I, obviously mistakenly, used 'case' for both things: the
implementation, and the assignment operation as such.

Ok.

Ok?

> It is generally agreed, whether you take Trask's first or
> second definition, that the category of "case" is a mapping
> from verbal arguments to thematic roles (whether by derivation
> or not).
WHAT??  Confusion alert!

But now you are mixing up levels, no?  This is not in line with the
rest of your argument.  You say in the very next paragraph:

> ...
> How those morphological forms map onto thematic roles is an
> entirely separate question.
'case' is merely a way of assigning arguments to their argument slot
of the verb.  That's an implementation not of a semantical operation,
but of a syntactical one.  Which thematic role is represented in the
XY argument of a verb is not expressed by case, but typically
lexicalized with the verb.  As you say later, case names are merely
arbitrary labels.

ASCII-graphically:

syntactical operation:
    noun phrase --is-assigned-to--> verbal argument slot

    Possible implementations:
       - word order
       - adpositions
       - case
       ...

semantical operation:
    verbal argument slot --is-assigned-to--> thematic role

    Implementation:
       - lexicon lookup for the verb
       ...?

Now, would we agree up to here?

If so, I *must* continue with a 'but' :-), because a syntactical
assignment operation very similar to that shown above (namely similar
by only differing in the words 'noun' and 'verbal') is typically
present in languages, thus also in a language with only one open
lexical class.

If that assignment operation is implemented morphologically, why am I
forbidden to call it 'case'?

Bye,
  Henrik

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