Re: Cases, again

Hi!

Michael Martin <mdmartin@...> writes:
> 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? Now what about, "we heard the
> man's voice"? Would the same pattern hold? "Man" in genitive, "voice"
> in dative?
Again, it depends on the language.  First of all, yes, 'man' is in
genitive case.

In German, the first 'house' is dative case, since 'zu' (spatial 'to')
selects that.  This is an exception, however; usually, motion towards
a location selects accusative case.

   Ich ging zum Haus (dat) des Mannes (gen).

If you had said 'into the man's house', German would have used it's
normal behaviour ('in' is a 'normal' spatial preposition) to have
accusative for motion towards:

   Ich ging ins Haus (acc) des Mannes (gen).


Your second example would have accusative case for a different reason:
it's simply the direct object (core case usage of the accusative: the
verb 'hören' = 'hear' selects that).

   Ich hörte die Stimme (acc) des Mannes (gen).

The core case is selected by the predicate.  For 'lauschen' = 'to
listen', German would select dative case:

   Ich lauschte der Stimme (dat) des Mannes (gen).

(This sounds a bit poetic, but the more modern verb 'zuhören'
= 'to listen' also selects dative case:

   Ich hörte der Stimme (dat) des Mannes (gen) zu.

This might be confusing because the sentence is quite similar to the
one with 'hören', so maybe forget it this...)

In English, this is reflected by the use of the preposition 'to',
which often relates with dative case in German.

And now, all the other languages described in the other postings will
probably behave quite differently. :-)

But at least Old Greek, Latin, Icelandic, etc. are close to German
(replace dative by ablative in Latin when talking about spatial
prepositions, though).

**Henrik

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