Re: Case Terminology Question

In a message dated 2/1/2003 6:50:28 PM Eastern Standard Time,
dawier@HOTMAIL.COM writes:


> I wish I could find a list of the alleged 48 or 52 cases of
> Tabassaran.
>
If you mean you want the _names_ of the cases, I can't help.
If you just want to know roughly what they're used for, they go like this*
(for Northern dialects):

There are 4 "core" or "non-local" cases: absolutive, ergative, genitive, and
dative.
(The absolutive is unmarked, i.e. has no suffix.)
The total number of local "cases" can be counted as 48 as follows:

There is a set of 8 suffixes encoding spatial orientation:
"in (a hollow space"
"on (horizontal)"
"behind"
"under"
"at"
"near, in front of"
"among"
"on (vertical)"

You then add a further suffix with 3 possibilities, for (1) lack of motion
[indicated by no suffix in this position] (2) motion towards or (3) motion
from.
These two layers of suffixes make 8 x 3 = 24 "local cases".

There is a further suffix, called "translative" which can be added to any of
the above combinations in order to make the location or motion more general
(so as to mean something like "from the direction of the river" as opposed to
"from the river")  This makes 8 x 3 x 2 = 48 "local cases."

The transative suffix can also be added to the dative, for a grand total of
48 + 4 + 1 = 53 "cases".

As you can guess from the title of the paper (and from the scare quotes I
keep putting around "cases"), the authors' point is that this is not a
reasonable way to count cases.  It's not as though there were 53 different
case suffixes to learn.  The total number of case-related morphemes (counting
those that are null) is 4 (core) + 8 (spatial orientation) + 3 (motion or
lack thereof) + 2 (translative suffix or not) = 17, and arguably it's an
exaggeration to count absences like that and it shoulld be 3 + 8 + 2 + 1 =
14.

Southern dialects, they say have 7 instead of 8 spatial orientation suffixes,
for a maximum count of 47 "cases".

*According to Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky in "The Great Daghestanian
Case Hoax", found in _Case, Typology and Grammar_ ed. by Anna Siewerska & Jae
Jung Song.  Pub. By John Benjamins, 1998.

Doug