Re: Colloquial German, experiencers and the construct state

Hi!

Carsten Becker <naranoieati@...> writes:
>...
> In colloquial German,
>
>   1) dem     Mann sein Haus
>      the.DAT man  his  house
>      "to the man his house"
>
> is one of two common variants used instead of the standard
>
>   2) das     Haus  des     Mannes
>      the.NOM house the.GEN man.GEN
>      "the house the man's"
>
> The other variant would be
>
>   3) das     Haus  von dem     Mann
>      the.NOM house of  the.DAT man
>      "the house of/from the man"
>
> which is IMO actually more grammatical than (1), but this
> is not my point.
>
> That colloquial German uses the construct case in (1) is
> obvious, ...
Wait, it is not.  It is similar to construct state, since the head is
marked, but actually, an additional possessive pronoun is very common
in these constructions.  (As Schnecki said, Hungarian and Turkish have
this.  I suspect Finnish, too.  And some langs *only* use a possessive
pronoun (Moro?  I don't recall).)

Real construct state would require a different form of he noun, I'd
say.  Anyway, yes, it's at least similar. :-)

Sorry for being nit-picky...

> ...but why is "dem Mann" ("to the man") in the dative
> case? ...
Probably because it's benefactive.  That's also one reading of dative
case.

>...
> There are as well some prepositions that govern the dative
> case (like "von" in 3).
>...
That's part of the lexicon -- I never start to search for the reason
of a case of a preposition, although there are some explanations, too.
It's funny that 'mit' uses dative and 'ohne' uses accusative and that
in Latin, *both* ('cum' and 'sine') use ablative.  Hmm. :-)

>...  Another interesting thing is that German puts the possessee -
> the head of the genitive NP - before the possessor, unlike English
> which places it after the possessor.  ...
Yes, and it seems to have changed.  'des Mannes Haus' is also ok, but
archaic.  Icelandic's default also is to put the genitive after, like
German:

   húsið mannsins - the man's house

**Henrik

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