Re: Cases, again

From:    Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
> Thomas Wier wrote:
> > 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.)
>
> You mean "no _nominal_ cases", I assume? Analyzing away case distinctions in
> pronouns seems like a tall order to me.
I would actually reserve judgment about the case system in pronouns,
because it is precisely here where the "cases" seem to be in greatest
flux.  As discussed earlier with the "and I" distinction, the nominative
(even in the third person) is leaking into what we formerly called
accusative positions, and the accusative has for a long time been
assuming "nominative" positions.  So it's not at all clear what the
morphology means for many people.  But yes, it seems best to me to analyze
nonpronominal nominals as not having any distinction of case at all.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637