Re: THEORY nouns and cases

Ray Brown scripsit:

> I would say tense is not comparable to case for a start. Secondly, I find
> it difficult to imagine any natlang would behave in the way described.
> Indeed, I've encountered a great many natlangs in my 60+ years, but I do
> not recall one that used word order to distinguish between time
> references.
Tense-by-word-order is bizarre, but I do think tense is parallel to case.
We can say that English has no case-1 in nouns, but uses the nominative/
accusative case-2 structure; in the same way, we can say that English
has no future tense-1, but uses a modal verb to specify future tense-2.

> But, again, I will quote Trask: "Tense is a frequent category in the
> languages of the world, but is far from universal, Chinese being an
> example of a language which lacks tense entirely."
Chinese lacks both tense-1 and tense-2 (aspect is the important
category there), but there are German dialects that have entirely lost
morphological tense-1, using auxiliaries exclusively to mark tense-2.

> >It clearly has a time-distinction, but no morphologically marked
> >tense.
Chinese can express time of action as part of the total linguistic
system, of course, but there is neither morphological nor syntactic
tense-2 as a category: it can be specified by adverbs, or glorked from
context.

> But lojban, like Loglan, was based, I thought, on clausal form logic and,
> indeed, in order to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it was purposely
> designed not to be like a natlang. Also, of course, altho lojban describes
> 'lo cribe' as you say (and you should know  :) it is possible that a
> linguist could analyze it as 'lo' being a substantiver, i.e. in 'lo cribe'
> , 'cribe' has indeed been substantivized & is a noun.
It's possible, but you'd have to ask a real linguistician (And, perhaps)
whether that analysis is at all plausible.  "lo" carries considerable
semantic baggage as well:  "at least some of those things which actually X".

> Is there any natlang where noun phrases occur but no actual nouns?
AFAIK little or nothing is known about natlangs that are both one-class
and isolating: most one-class languages require either noun or verb
affixes on their one-class roots.

> Yes - but as we seem to be dealing with matters upon which there is
> disagreement among professional linguists, I think in the end the
> agreement might be, as we say in English, "to agree to disagree"   :)
ObDigression:  Anna Weetabix claims, with what accuracy I don't know,
that this concept does not exist in Russian (nor does the concept of
"white lie"); OTOH, English interlocutors can express agreement in
varying intensities from "I entirely agree" to simply "Right", whereas
"I entirely disagree" and "Wrong" are conversationally impossible.
Not so in Russian, where the negatives are as usable as the positives.

> No I don't. I do not say that when Chinese fronts a noun in accusative
> case, it marks the accusative with the particle 'ba'. I say that Chinese
> marks a fronted direct object with the particle 'ba';
Anyhow, "ba" does not merely front the direct object: it also carries
specific semantics, those of "disposal".  If the direct object is not
disposed of, "ba" is inapplicable.  Similarly, the closest Chinese
equivalent to the passive, "bei", is only applicable if the action is
disagreeable to the underlying subject:  "John was punished" is
perspicuous with "bei", but "John was rewarded" is not.

> Like in English: "It's the woman next door's cat" - where "'s" is suffixed
> to the whole phrase "the woman next door"  :)
H.L. Mencken published the extreme case "That-there umbrella is the
young lady I go with's."

--
"You know, you haven't stopped talking          John Cowan
since I came here. You must have been           http://www.reutershealth.com
vaccinated with a phonograph needle."           jcowan@reutershealth.com
        --Rufus T. Firefly                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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