Re: THEORY: genitive vs. construct case/izafe

> > (When a noun is not possessed in a language with
> > morphological state, it gets the "absolutive state" in some terminologies.
> > This is what it's called for Nahuatl, for example, or Tzeltal.)
>
> (Oh yes, I remember the absolutive state in Nahuatl... It's been a
> long time since I've last had to deal with ergative-absolutive
> languages, so it took me a while to remember that yes, there's an
> absolutive *case* as well.)
I'd say this is a misrepresentation of the absolutive suffix in
Nahuatl.  It does disappear, true, when possessive prefixes are
used, but it also disappears in the unpossessed plural.   And
Nahuatl is a more or less run-of-the-mill nominative/accusative
language, not an ergative language like Tzeltal.  I wouldn't
call it a case at all; if anything, it's some kind of determiner,
but even that is a stretch.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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