Re: Using 'to be' and cases

Hi!

zzz <kyrawertho@...> writes:
> On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:12:58 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>..
> >Accusative is used neither in German here, nor in Japanese (two langs
> >that more or less overtly mark case).  The point is, one of the
> >constituents is usually viewed to be part of the verb, which is,
> >therefore, intransitive, while the other one is the argument.
> >
> >Japanese shows this quite clearly: in 'is her dream a thought',
> >'dream' would be marked to be the topic, while 'thought' would get no
> >marking and is just before the 'to be' verb.  The structure is:
> >
> >   she-GEN dream-TOP thought is QUESTION?
> >
> >I.e. 'thought-being' is the concept the intransitive, compound verb
> >expresses, and the sentences asks whether 'her dream' is the argument
> >of that verb.
> >
> >Contrast with: 'is her thought a dream?':
> >
> >   she-GEN thought-TOP dream is QUESTION?
> >
> >In German, it's essentially the same, only it does not used markers
> >that make the situation as clear as in Japanese, but uses word order
> >only.
> >
>
> That seems nice. I looked it up
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-prominent_language) and I'll expiriment
> a bit with this first.
Ah, but please note that my point was not that Japanese uses the topic
marker.  It is actually 'nominative case' in Japanese that is
accidentally overridden by the topic marker in the above sentence.  So
my point is: one noun goes unmarked because it's part of the verb,
while the other gets nominative marking (or the marking of the only
argument of intransitive verbs the particular language uses).

To make the nominative marker overt in Japanese, we'd need a sentence
where there's no topic/where the semantic topic is the predicative noun,
which cannot be marked as topic.  E.g. in a situation like:

 - What is a thought?
 - Her dream is a thought.

Here, 'her dream' is not a topic, so you get the following structure
in Japanese:

   she-GEN dream-NOM thought is.

The topic marker is just more dominant, so it overrides the nominative
marker.

Sorry for the confusion, but German examples aren't that interesting
for comparison since word order is used to distinguish your two
sentences, just like in English.

**Henrik