Re: cases depending of nouns

>From: Damian Yerrick <tepples@...>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
>To: CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu
>Subject: Re: cases depending of nouns
>Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 23:45:08 -0500
>
>"# 1" <salut_vous_autre@...> wrote:
>
> > After reading about Garawa grammar and learning that the pronouns
> > follow a nominative-accusative system and the nouns follow an
> > ergative-absolutive system, it led me to think of something.
> >
> > In active languages, the case of the subject of intransitive verb will
>vary
> > depending of the verb (and, in Fluid-S, of its volition), but are
>there
> > languages in which the case will vary depending of the noun used?
> >
> > Like, for example, the word "dog" might only be absolutive and the
>word
> > "man", only nominative in intransitive clauses, making that "the dog
>runs"
> > and "the man runs" would not use the same case without implying a
>change of
> > volition between the two sentences?
> >
> > Does such thing exists? If so how is it called?
>
>In general this is called differential object marking based
>on animacy. (Use Google.)
>
Thanks, that is what I wanted to do but I was not able to do this without a
word to search for and searching for "case marking nouns intransitive" could
not help..

If it has a name, I must assume it already exists... There are so few things
that don't exist...

>--
>Damian
- Max