Re: genitive

AFMCL below; I hope it helps.

On Wed, 1 May 2002 07:04:46 +0100, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
wrote:
>
>"adjective" simply has not been considered a noun case before.  Indeed, in
>all the language I know with a case system (and I know quite a few) simply
>do not have an 'adjective case'.  I do know of languages whose genitive
>behaves like an adjective, but that's a different matter.
I don't quite follow what ebera's been saying, but MNCL has something like
an adjectival morphology which I call "case", since it contrasts with the
absolutive, ergative, and adverbial cases (and also a "predicative" form).
It's used for all qualifying words (which are most often semantic
adjectives, but don't have to be), syntactically all but the last in the
phrase.

e.g.
    Zo    xato       java    --- the hot coffee
  DEF-ADJ hot-ADJ coffee-ABS

{Zo javo xata} is also possible.

There's no gender/agreement. There may be a better term for this than
"case", but it's *really* hard to find terminology appropriate to languages
outside both the Latin and English molds.

Jeff J.

>I am also aware of the old (now, I think, defunct) terminology whereby the
>category "noun" included both what we commonly call 'nouns' today and what
>we call adjectives; but this category was subdivided into: "nouns
>substantive" (i.e. what we simply call 'nouns' today) and "nouns
>adjective".  But these were two subdivision, one was not the case of the
>other.
>
>Indeed, in languages that mark case, adjectives commonly have case endings
>and 'agree' with the noun they qualify.  Are you seriously saying that it
>is possible for an adjective which qualifies a noun in the 'adjective
>case' also to be in the 'adjective case'?
>
>[snip]
>>
>>In most european languages, some specific kind of nouns are left unmarked
>>at the adjective (like 'blue'),
>
>This looks like the old 'noun substantive'~'noun adjective' distinction.
>Even so, it is not a _case_ distinction.
>
>>....but most nouns/verb roots are
>>'adjectivized' (i.e. marked at the adjective case) by an inflection,
>
>Inflexion?  Surely, by derivation through adding a formative affix?
>
[snip]
>
>Ray.