Re: Cases, again

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.

In Latin and Esperanto, "house" would be in the accusative because it is
the target of motion toward.  Other languages have a special case
specifically for this purpose (the allative), and therefore don't even
have a preposition in front of "house".  Still other languages include
the meaning of the preposition in the verb, so you have a verb meaning
"to go to" which takes "house" as a direct object, again causing it to
be in the accusative, but with no preposition.

> Now what about, "we heard the
> man's voice"? Would the same pattern hold? "Man" in genitive, "voice"
> in dative?
No, "voice" would be in the accusative case, because it is the object of
the verb.

The above assumes we're talking about an accusative language, of course,
and not ergative, etc.

-Mark

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