Re: Need Advice on Syntax & Case System

Christian Thalmann sikyal:

> Question:
>
> - Do you find the description of the cases and their uses
>   comprehensible and/or intuitive?
Uh, no.  You spend a while describing the various syntactic variants of
cases, but I couldn't find any explanation of what the difference between
Predicative and Objective was.  Most of your examples are what would be
Indirect Object and Direct Object in English, or Accusative/Dative in
Greek or Latin.  Was that your intent?

> - Can you think of situations where this case system would fail or
>   produce problems?
Not really, although I don't really understand what semantic motivations
you're using to distinguish the two object cases.  I do like the examples
where you use the different cases to show general v. specific action, but
I wonder if those might cause problems in other situations.

Other comments--

You wrote:

"If for some reason we want to highlight an explicit subject, we can
mention it first as an independent verbless statement (which I call a
topic declaration), and then follow up with an implicit verb V P O / V O P
structure:

Torav,  lonna    u    lawne   i    fele.
Man:d   sing:3i  PRE  song:i  OBJ  woman:d
Lit.:  "The man. Sings-he a song to the woman."
The man, he sings a song to the woman.

Note that in this case, |torav| is the topic declaration, which should be
considered as a statement of its own, and not part of the sentence |Lonna
u lawne i fele.|"

This is a very natural feature, but your description of it is very odd.
Why should we consider "torav" to be part of a different sentence?  It's
much simply and linguistically more accurate to say that there is a
pre-verbal focus, and that any element receiving particular emphasis can
be moved to that position.  Such is a very common thing,
cross-linguistically.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton