Re: Noun Cases

David Peterson wrote:
> The dictionary form will depend on the language.  The "base" form is
> generally the nominative in nominative/accusative languages and the
> absolutive in ergative/absolutive languages.
Of course, many languages use a zero suffix for nominative or
absolutive, as the case may be, thus, in those languages, the citation
form would be formally equivalent to the stem.  Indeed, in a sense,
English is an example, although the cases are only "possessive" and
"nonpossessive".

In Japanese, the dictionary form is the word with no case particles, but
then, the nominative and accusative particles can often be dropped in
certain contexts.  Still, you could imagine a language in which at one
stage such case-marking was optional (at least in the sense that there
are contexts where case can be unmarked, it may, of course, be under
very specific conditions), and thus the dictionary form was the bare
stem, but then at a later stage, case-marking became obligatory, so that
the bare stem could *never* be used in a sentence.  Nevertheless, you'd
likely have an intermediate stage where the bare stem would still be
used as the dictionary/citation form.  However, this probably wouldn't
last very long, and after a few generations, the nominative form would
likely take over as a dictionary/citation form.

In addition, Michael Martin wrote:
>
> Also on the subject, what is the difference between the causative and
> instrumental cases, or is there a difference?
I've never heard of a causative case, but I would imagine that it would
be a case that was only used for the causee, as in "The mother made HER
SON eat the peas", whereas the instrumental would be used in a sentence
like "The boy ate the peas WITH A FORK".  Some languages use
instrumental to mark the causee, while others use other oblique cases,
such as dative (I would say that English could probably be considered,
syntactically, to be in that category, as the causee acts very much like
a normal indirect object)

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