Re: Which part of speech?

Damian Yerrick <tepples@...> palsalge:

>"Ray Brown" <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>
>> On Monday, May 9, 2005, at 05:23 , Muke Tever wrote:
>>
>> > According to AHD:
>> > http://www.bartleby.com/61/91/Y0019100.html
>> > ..."yesterday" has both nominal and adverbial senses.
>>
>> Precisely! I quote from 'Chambers English Dictionary':
>>
>> today
>> "_n._ this or the present day. - _adv._ on the present day: nowadays"
>>
>> yesterday
>> "_n._ the day last past: (often in _pl._) the recent past - _adv._ on the
>> day last past: formerly: in the recent past"
>
>It can get hairier with compounds:
>"I was reading the CONLANG list last night."
>
>So then how do you parse "last night" as an adverb?  Wouldn't
>it just be simpler (in the Occam's Razor sense) to assign a
>zero-derived case to every noun naming a day?
>
>--
>Damian
Precisely.

Zero-derived case or null preposition--it depends on your theory of case
assignment, mostly. Minimalism prefers the latter, since the default case
is usually called partitive and is found, I believe, mainly in passives in
English. (In Tagalog, it's called oblique and found mainly in
antipassives.) So if you don't have the default case, you need to have a
case assigner, which would usually be a preposition in English. I'm not
sure which theories of grammar would use an inherent (I assume, at any
rate) case rather than providing a case assigner.

But yes. In English, these are nouns; in Latin, they're adverbs. There's
nothing that says a [semantic] word must have the same part of speech
assigned to it in every language. Right?

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