Re: a grammar sketch...

On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 06:34:56PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> > Traditionally, "here" is in dative case and "flowers" in accusative, or
> > as
> > we are talking active langs here, objective case.
[snip]
> I thought of that, except (as H.S. Teoh has done, rather more coherently)
> "accusative" and "dative" seem somehow wrong, because the *point* of the
> action is for "her" to have the flower, not for the flower to belong to
> "her," so "her" is in some sense the recipient of the action.  :-/  I
> *know* I'm saying this poorly.
[snip]

Heh. The peril of replying to the previous message without reading this
one first :-P  I was all excited because I noticed that your accomplice
case coincides with one of the usages of my conlang's conveyant case. I
guess that wasn't really a coincidence :-)

But yeah, I know what you're talking about. I struggled for a long time
with the awkwardness of the accusative + dative construct too, because
when you give something to someone, that someone is a primary focus of
your sentence; it shouldn't be relegated to a secondary dative case.
Rather, the thing given, which usually isn't that important in terms of
focus, should be the noun that's in a secondary tense, and the recipient
of the gift should be in a primary tense.

That's the reasoning I had when I came up with my conlang's conveyant
case. Of course, from there, I generalized a little more, and noticed
other semantic problems with "traditional" case markings -- which I won't
get into here unless people are interested -- and that's how my current
case system came about.


T