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

From:    Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
> Hmm, but I don't really see a big difference in marking it
> morphologically or marking it by position.  Furthermore, IIRC, in the
> case of Chinese, when you front an object for pragmatic reasons, you
> can mark it with a particle to be the dislocated object.  I think it
> was a suffixed 'ba', but I'm not sure.
>
> 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.
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.  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.

[...]

> 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?
You're saying, in effect, that case is an abstract property;  but if
it is abstract, then what evidence do you have that it actually exists?
In any event, you certainly have seen at least one language, English,
which has phrasal clitics that have case-like properties.  But these
are overt, and your argument has been that case can be covert.

> So is case not more a property of arguments and adjuncts?
Your statement again assumes that case is some kind of abstract
property, rather than an overt realization of thematic roles
(or other nominal features) as Ray and I have been arguing.  You
could argue on theory-internal grounds, but those are rarely
convincing to the nonbeliever.

 =========================================================================
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

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