Re: a case-free language?
| From: | Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, October 7, 2004, 12:12 |
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Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 10:06:41 +0200
From: taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>
Subject: Re: a case-free language?
> > > (i) Not repeated for each NP in coordinate phrases
> > > (ii) Does not merge morphologically with another word
> >
> > The first of these is the criterion that actually distinguishes cases
> > from postpositions; the second is only a practical concern not actually
> > related to case-marking as such, but to boundedness in morphology.
>
> So how about a language where all suffixes common to two NPs can move
> onto the conjunction that is joining them together? There is some degree
> of morphological merger as well.
Could you provide a real world example of this? This still wouldn't
provide case as such, since the thematic-assigners (to use a term that
does not favor one analysis over the other) would not be part of the
separate NPs. They thus couldn't be morphologically merged with those
Ns, either.
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Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
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Chicago, IL 60637