Re: Looking for a case: counting

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> wrote:

  First of all an apology: I read this list in digests, therefore I
can't react promptly.

> By the way, shouldn't *raz* be a genitive in *mnogo raz* ?
  Yes, <raz> is plural genitive (= Gpl) form. In Slavic languages
Gpl follows numbers 5 and above (including indefinite numerals).
And this genitive construction used in nominative, accusative and
genitive context (but not for other cases).

> If *raz* is a genitive plural, then what are the singular and plural
> nominatives for it ?
  The singular nominative is <raz>, the plural nominative is
<razy>.

> Why is it not *razov* ?).
  The answer is in the deepest depth of the language history. <ov>
was originally the Gpl marker of the "u"-stem nominals, like <syn>
(it was the bare diphtonguic grade of thematic part of the stem).
In case of "o"-stem nominals, like <raz>, the Gpl was the same as
singular nominative (both ended in "hard yer"), only the tone could
have been different. (N.B. Ancient Slav had tonal stress like
present-day Serbian-Croatian-Slovenian.)

  During the Old Slav period the declension system was changed from
thematic to gender-oriented paradigms. In this new system the "u"-
stem Gpl became a general masculine Gpl marker, but there are some
-- mostly idiomatic -- archaisms like Russian <raz> (or masculine
"pluralia tantum" place names in Slovak). In Ukrainian "regular"
form can be found, e.g. "16 raziv" '16 times'. Probably the Russian
Gpl here is due to the Old Church Slavonic, since the letter had a
very strong influence on standard Russian.

> Can somebody's backside be considered as an instrument ?  I would do
> a distinction between 'external instrument' and 'body part used as an
> instrument'.
  Surely can be an instrument, why not? Similar to your distinction
exists in several languages in case of genitive: the inherent
possessed* and the external possessed (unfortunately I don't know
the accepted English terms). But these differ only on syntactic
level. In terms of a "phonological" approach: I don't think that
you could find a contastive pair: a different meaning of the same
base when you use it as an 'external instrument' and 'body part
used as an instument'. Therefore they can be joined in a common
"adverbeme" ["adverbeme" is just my sudden ad hoc forming from word
"adverb" after the pattern of "phoneme" from "phone"].

  The abstraction is a powerful mental feature of the human being.
During the abstraction we can schematize things, find parallelisms
and join them common concepts. I feel that you try to implement an
opposite process. It resembles me the argumentation system of the
so-called Chinese sophists who were taught that a white horse is
not a horse: the difference in attributes, like color, makes it
impossible to abstract the common category of "horse", cf.
<http://cedar.forest.net/hackett/RCCP-whitehorse.htm>

  [* A similar feature has Hungarian: most of the kinship terms are
used always with possessive suffix. It resembles to the concept of
the "inherent possessed".]

> Do you mean that in a sentence like *I've been living for many years
> in the woods with wolves*, 'many years', 'the woods' and 'wolves' are
> all adverbial concepts ??? In that case, nearly everything could be
> adverbial. As to me, these are all circumstants: 'for many years' is
> temporal, 'in the woods' is local, and 'with wolves' is comitative.
  I'm trying to understand your term "circumstant" (I've not
finished yet with this task :). We -- you and me -- came from
different schools, and maybe we have contradictory scholar biasses.
Probably you can model my adverbial concept as an addition of your
adverbs and your circumstants substracting the features in the next
comment below.

> By 'adverbial concepts', I mean concepts modifying the way the verbal
> concept itself (the core) is conceived, like 'slowly', 'gracefully'
  Some of your examples seem rather kinds of "modality" to me. I
can encapsulate the 'slowly' into a Hugarian verb: <megy> 'go' >
<megyeget> 'go slowly', <lép> 'step' > <lépeget> 'step slowly'.

  On other hand, adverbs like <hardly> (like in <I hardly know>)
can be coded into Turkic, Ojibwa (etc.) dubitative mood.

  As I wrote in my previous posting: we -- Hungarians and Slovaks --
 distinguish iterativity as a modality which is encapsulated in the
verb, and the interativity as an adverbial concept which is
expressed by an adverbial phrase (no matter it's an <-ly>-word or a
prepositional phrase). And we can combine these two interativity
concepts.

  I've rather a synthetic intellect than an analytic one, therefore
I feel I can hardly formulate things in your manner. But do your
concepts enable the above ambiguity of the iterativity?.

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