Re: THEORY nouns and cases

From:    Joe <joe@...>
> > Being just a plain ol' empricist, I do not subscribe to the GB theory nor
> > to concepts such as 'deep case'. By 'case' I mean what Larry Trask gives
> > as meaning 1. I quote from him again:
> > "1. A distinctive, overtly marked form which can be assumed by an NP to
>
> My personal belief, actually, is that it is marked - it's marked by word
> order(Thus, the only language with 1/0 cases is MRLL).
I think you and Henrik are confusing two separate issues:  morphosyntactic
properties and cognitivo-semantic ones. Cases (in Trask's first sense)
generally are an overt marker of some semantic opposition, such as that
between the thematic roles Agent and Patient (or any number of other roles).
Human languages need only have some convention, whether by case or wordorder
or what have you, to distinguish different thematic roles.  The fact that
some languages use wordorder and others use case (or both) does not mean
those amount to the same structural mapping.

(Unfortunately, much of current linguistic theory is founded on the same
misunderstanding.)

> Let me give another example - if a language was to mark tense with word
> order (VSO-preterite, SVO-present, SOV-future) - would you say it has no
> tense?  It clearly has a time-distinction, but no morphologically marked
> tense.  And yet, I would suggest that it does indeed have tense, though
> I am not sure if you would.
This is specious reasoning:  you can't use as empirical evidence
something for which you have no evidence that it exists.  (And I would
wager that there are no such tense systems.)

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
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Chicago, IL 60637