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

From:    Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
> "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> writes:
> > From:    Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
> > > You might now say: ok, then *Chinese* does have case, but other
> > > languages don't.  I just fail to see that it is a big difference of
> > > using order or morphology.
> >
> > I guess my great reservation with your argument is that you're
> > conflating morphosyntactic issues with cognitive and semantic issues.
>
> I thought I was not mixing up the two levels.  In the case above, I
> meant that case used the syntactical instrument of word order.  From
> this point of view, it is still so that Chinese can be analysed to
> have two 'cases' (or three in the case of 'give'), since the word
> order makes them clear.
What I meant is that you are assuming that "case" can exist
apart from some actual construction or form in the language.
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).  Now, by saying "case used the syntactical instrument
of word order", you are still assuming that case and word order
are distinct.  Thus, if case is distinct from wordorder, but
a language (say, Chinese) has no morphological marking of that
semantic mapping, then case must be some abstract property of
the verbal argument.  This is precisely what Ray and I have
been arguing against:  that such a thing as case is "abstract"
rather than overt.

> > The point of both wordorder and case systems (in Trask's first sense) --
> > morphosyntactic phenomena -- is not to define meaning, but rather be
> > the overt realization of that meaning.
>
> Yes.  Verb A wants two arguments, then word order says which comes
> before A and which one after A.  I did not say anything about what it
> means and whether they are nom, acc, dat or anything.
My point, though, was that "nom" "acc", etc. have *no* meaning:
they are purely labels for morphological forms.  How those morphological
forms map onto thematic roles is an entirely separate question.

> > Your stance, in line with much work in Minimalism-GB-PP work,
> > basically asks us to believe that the separate grammatical modules
> > are not, in fact, very autonomous of one another because you are
> > coding semantics directly into the syntax, rather than putting
> > semantics into, well, the semantic module.
>
> No, I'm surely not trying to make anyone believe this.  I like a
> strict distinction, too.
Good -- we are in agreement about this methodological point, at least.
(Many practicing theoretical syntacticians are not.)

> > My current conlang seems to violate the above putative universal
> > because it allows phrases to have case.  I'm sure I've seen natural
> > languages attaching case markers to phrases.
>
> This is a circular argument:  how do you know it actually is a case?
[...]

>I did not notice this and actually, this is interesting.  If I called
> that 'morphological function markers', would that be ok?
This is probably better, yes.  But at least in the case of the
English "genitive", it's not clear that clitics can be called
cases at all, at least by any normal use of the term.  Clitics
are defined generally by having the distribution of words, but
the phonological properties of affixes.  In "the Queen of
England's crown", the crown notionally belongs to the Queen,
not to England, though the complement NP "of England" follows
"Queen".

> So I need
> not argue against case being a morphological category of nouns: simply
> one-class languages simply don't have case, since they have no
> nouns. :-)
Right:  no nouns, no case.

> OTOH, what is done by my 'morphological function markers' really is
> what is done by case is languages that have nouns. :-)
Depends on their distribution.  Syntactic categories are defined
not by their function, but by their over distribution.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

Reply