Re: Looking for a case: counting

To me, that should not be a case. Cases apply to noun
concepts. I understand the expression 'many times' as
if it was an temporal adverb, 'manitimes', modifying
the sens of the verb 'threw'.

Conceptually, AFAIK, this is called an 'iterative',
and it belongs to the notion of 'process
quantification'. Process quantification is close to
the concept of aspect, but most of the people-who-know
say it is something different. The opposite of
iterative would be semelfactive, that meaning that the
action is done only once.

I think that we should add one more distinction: when
we say 'iterative', we have a tendency to consider
that the action is done regularly, like in 'I stand up
every morning at 7:00'. But in this example, it is
probably not the case: there is no real regularity in
the occurences of throwing the ball. I think there
must be a name for that concept too, but I forgot it.

--- "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> wrote:
> In this sentence:
>
>         I threw the ball for the dog many times in
> the park yesterday.
>
> It feels to me like "times" should be in some sort
> of "counting" case,
> but I don't have a name for it, or anything
> appropriate in my current
> morphology.  How do other highly-inflected languages
> treat this sort of
> thing?
>
> -Mark

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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