Re: coexisting case question

Double-barreled reply here.

On Tue, 9 Sep 2008 12:52:58 +0800, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:

>The quantitative case exists as adverbs in Chinese and Japanese, as well as
>Korean.
Adverbs?!  That's an analysis of the counters I've never seen before.  Whose
is it?  How's it justified?

On Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:38:29 -0500, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>
wrote:

>On Sep 8, 2008, at 5:36 PM, René Uittenbogaard wrote:
>
>> My question concerns the case of which I've forgotten the name,
>> let me call it the "reverse genitive" case just for convenience.
>
>It sounds like you're thinking of the construct state of the Semitic
>languages. Note that I didn't say case; AIUI it is a category
>separate from the case system.
Right, in Semitic.  Many many langs do the same thing with their 'possessed
by a third person' marking as well ('his/her/its X'), in a paradigm that
also includes first and second persons as well.  (And in these you often get
nice lexicalisations of the possessed form with particular narrow senses:
"its wind" -> "breath", "its water" -> "sap", whatever.)

>I don't know of a language that would put the possessed in the
>construct state AND allow the possessor to take various cases. IIRC
>in Arabic the possessor, when marked for case at all, is always put
>in the genitive. Anyone know for sure?
>
>But it does sound like a cool idea!
It seems to me like something some language probably does, somewhere.  After
all, possessor raising is something plenty of languages do -- English "he
hit _me_ on the leg" with the same semantic force as "he hit _my leg_" is an
example -- and with appropriate case marking you'd get this pattern.

>> But for quantities:
>> I-NOM hold glass-REVGEN wine-ACC.
>> I am holding a glass of wine.
>>
>> We might even label this last example as "quantitative case".
>> What's in a name, but it looks a lot more plausible like this :)
>
>This actually looks like what's called the partitive case in Finnish
>and maybe some other languages.
But it's the reverse of the partitive case, no?  Just as the construct
(being agnostic as to whether that's a case or a state or what, which surely
is language-dependent) is the reverse of the genitive.  It would still be
glass-ACC wine-PART using a partitive.

A quantitative case alongside a genitive sounds entirely believable to me,
anyhow.

Perhaps English "-ful" (as in "cupful") could even be construed as a parallel?

Alex