Re: THEORY nouns and cases

Ray Brown said:
>
>> It clearly has a time-distinction, but no morphologically marked
>> tense.
>
> I know of no language which has non-morphologically marked tense. That
> does not, of course, mean such a language doesn't exist, but I cannot
> comment until I know rather more about the language which is purported to
> have tense marked by variation in syntax.
Strongly isolating languages mark tense periphrastically, obviously, if
your definition of 'tense' allows for that possibility. But I'm inclined
to use the term 'tense' like you use the term 'case' and limit it to bound
morpheme classes (which are as varied as any other bound morphemes in the
world's languages -- phoneme segments, morphophoneme segments,
morphotonemes, word prosody morphophonemes, etc.). Figuring out how
different languages can encode concepts of *time* is a whole 'nother can
o' worms, and tense is only a small part of that even in languages that do
have tense in the strict surface-morphology sense.


> Is there any natlang where noun phrases occur but no actual nouns?
I don't think Malay/Indonesian has any open classes that can reasonably be
called 'noun', 'verb' or any of the other open-class metaconcepts we've
inherited from Latin philology. From what I've been able to gather, this
is true of all Austronesian languages that are as isolating as Malay. It
makes them easy to learn but very hard to describe (when all you have is
dusted-off Latin philology to go by...).


> Good - I still have this hangover from my few years on a certain other
> list where suspicion was rife and flames frequent.
Oh, surely that improved a lot after *I* left that list.......


> I agree that wo3 is the subject, ni3 is the indirect object and that shu1
> is the direct object. I disagree strongly that Chinese possesses a
> nominative, dative and accusative cases which all happen to have the same
> morphological form.
"Case" is simply not a useful term for that language unless you're very
clear that you're talking about a semantic category in your particular
brand of theory and not a morphological surface category. When not
associated with a particular theory that defines the term "case" a certain
way, the term should always be taken to refer to surface morphology (as in
Trask's first definition).


>> But ok, maybe the difference between case, prepositional phrases and
>> verb+noun phrases is vague.  Or is it not?
>
> Not the way I use case.
Right. Case is just one way of marking (part of) the relationship between
a noun group and the verbal nucleus of a clause; prepositions and word
order are other ways. Case is case, prepositions are prepositions, and
word order is word order. They all help to solve similar problems, and
it's fun and interesting to compare languages in that way. But anytime you
talk about 'case', you have to either be talking about surface morphology
or about a contextually understood brand of theory.


>> Can Finnish cases like
>> allative be analysed as postpositional phrases?  If not, why not?
>
> Because the suffix cannot be separated from the noun and the suffixing of
> case endings can change the phonetic structure of the ending and/or the
> noun stem, i.e. the two morphemes become inseparable.
I don't think they act like clitics, either, so I agree that the answer is
no.


>> What about languages with only one lexical class like Nootka?
>
> I confess I know practically nothing about Nootka. I cannot comment on
> your questions without at least some knowledge of the language & it would
> be helpful to see different descriptions of it. To my skeptical mind, I
> just wonder if the 'one class' will prove to be as elusive as the 'one
> vowel' (or no vowel) claimed for some natlangs.
>
> [snip - because without a proper description of Nootka, I cannot usefully
> reply]
I don't believe Nootka has only one lexical class; I believe that its
lexical classes simply fail to map onto our usual IE categories of nouns
and verbs and such.


-- Mark

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