Re: Cases, again

From:    "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 07:19:46PM -0800, Michael Martin wrote:
> > Now, along the same lines, in a sentence like, "I went to the man's
> > house" my assumption would be that "man" is in the genitive and "house"
> > is in the dative case. Is that correct?
>
> It depends.  In the English, "man's" is in the genitive, but you can't
> say anything about "house" because English nouns don't have any case
> other than the genitive.
Arguably, English has no cases at all.  Because the "genitive" case
is in fact a clitic for all but prescriptivists ("The Queen of England's
Crown" is usually taken to mean the crown is the Queen's, not England's
per se.), one of the key criteria for casehood, boundness of morphological
realization, fails.  (The clitic is bound, but to a phrasal not a
nominal category.)

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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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Chicago, IL 60637

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