Re: Construct Case

David Peterson wrote:

>    I came across a book in the library today called "Construct Case",
> which they describe as the phenomenon of one word having more
> than one case tag (we've been calling it Suffixaufnahme, and they
> also say that "case stacking" or "CS" is an appropriate term).  There
> was a neat example in there that I thought I'd share.  I didn't write
> it down, so I'm going to have to paraphrase.
>
> The sentence in question was "The woman gave food to the child..."
> and this was then followed by a phrase that referred to one of the NP's.
> So the cases of the first part looked like this:
>
> woman-ERG. food-ABS. child-DAT. gave...
>
> Then it was followed by a few different phrases...
>
> (1) ...in the house.  /in house-OBL.-ABS./
> (2) ...in the house.  /in house-OBL.-DAT./
> (3) ...from the camp.  /camp-ABL.-ERG./
>
> No further specification was necessary because the secondary case tag
> tells you which NP the phrase applies to.  The first applies to the food
> (that is, it's the food that was in the house); the second applies to the
> child (that is, it's the child that was in the house); the third is to
> the woman
> (that is, the woman was the one who was coming from the camp).
> Thus, a sentence like, "The woman gave the child food in the house",
> which would be ambiguous in English, would be necessarily unambiguous
> in...the language in question.  (I forgot that too.  :(  It was
> Australian, and
> not one of the popular ones: Diyari, Dyirbal, etc.)
>
> Anyway, I thought this was neat, so I thought I'd share it.  :)
>
One of my projects, Ekmartenkar, has tons of suffixaufnahme. Genitive
case requires it, while some cases (locative, instrumental, manner) may
or may not use it depending on whether the noun is directly associated
with another noun.