Re: English has 4 cases, not 3!

Quoting Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>:

> If you take the broadly-acceptable definition of case (i.e., a
> nominal/pronominal morpheme of some sort) then, for the most part,
> English doesn't really have cases, and certainly no allative/
> locative, etc. I'd have thought to be called a 'case' you'd have
> to have some sort of across-the-board feature, which -ward(s) isn't.
> You can't say "mewards", "windowwards", "dogwards" or so on. But
> of course these things are rarely shut up in neat boxes, and the
> case (sorry!) that can be made for a Genitive, say, is very strong.
Well, it's not quite that simple. English, under most analyses, does
have a notion of case:  certain forms of pronouns, for example,
are simply ungrammatical in certain circumstances:

  *I saw he.
  *him saw him.

But equally clearly, these case forms affect only a very small part
of English vocabulary, namely, pronouns.  So, the productivity of
case forms is also an issue.  With the -wards example, it could be
that it is simply not very productive as a case ending.  Another
problem is that there is a continuum from things we call "case
endings" to things that are really more like derivational morphemes.
The (somewhat arbitrary) distinction that is sometimes made between
them is that cases are always bound morphemes and must be used to
mark thematic roles like agent, patient, instrument, etc., while
derivational morphemes are often bound, but are used optionally
and mark things like spatial relations (like -wards).  Clearly,
there is a large amount of overlap, since not only does a good
deal of the literature treat spatial relations like thematic
relations, but in some languages, they tend to actually pattern
that way. For example, thematic and spatial morphemes might all
necessarily be marked for number in addition to their other meanings,
while other affixes may not do so.

In the case of English, case is in fact affected by number (me vs. us),
while "-wards" is not, so maybe that is a reason for saying the former
is case-marking, while the latter is derivational marking. IMHO, it
is quite an arbitrary decision, because it deals more with the
methodology of description than with actual distinctions made in the
data before us.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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