Re: Order of cases

On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 12:15:20PM -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> I dunno why Henrik used it, but that order is the one that has always
> felt most natural to me.  The nominative is the usual "main" case,
> since it is the case of the first argument of all verbs (in an
> accusative system), so it goes first.  Verbs that take a second argument
> take either another nominative or the accusative, so the second
> case is the accusative.   The dative is used for the third argument of a
> verb, so it goes third.
To clarify - please note that here I am not referring to the order in
which the arguments appear within a sentence, which is irrelevant to my
point.  I was referring to a more fundamental order: verbs which have
*only* one argument put that argument in the nominative.  Verbs which
have only two arguments use two nominatives (e.g. the copula) or a
nominative and an accusative.  The dative can only be used used for an
argument to the verb (the indirect object), when the verb already has
two other objects.

There are of course other uses of the accusative and dative besides
indicating the direct and indirect object of a verb, but I
regard such uses as secondary in terms of the raison d'etre of the
cases themselves.

-Marcos