Re: Cases, again

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 10:43:39 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>There's apparently a universal against prepositions governing the nominative.
>Unaware of this, I made all prepositions in the Klaishic languages govern it.
>
>                                                             Andreas
In pjaukra, also unaware of that universal, I made prepositions govern
either the nominative or locative.  In general, the prepositions that take
the locative have spatial or temporal senses, while those that take the
nominative are more abstract.  I can think of one preposition which can take
both:  _ka_ with locative renders 'from', whereas with the nominative it is
used to introduce the causer in the analytic causative construction.
(Incidentally, this construction works thus:
er      paju    bakxe
1sg.NOM eat.PPF fish.ACC
'I ate a fish'
vs.
ka   le      er      paju bakxe
from 2sg.NOM 1sg.NOM
'you forced me to eat a fish'
which I think is also typologically unexpected.)

Historically, there was a dative case which later merged into the nominative
that the first group of prepositions governed.  There was also once a case
difference signalling the static vs. motion distinction for spatial
prepositions, using locative for the static sense and allative for the
motion sense; but the allative case also disappeared, and left the current
situation in which the spatial prepositions (for which this static/motion
distinction made sense) take a single case, but a different one than the
others.

Alex