Re: Cases, again

Quoting "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:

> 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.)
You mean "no _nominal_ cases", I assume? Analyzing away case distinctions in
pronouns seems like a tall order to me.

                                                Andreas