THEORY nouns and cases

Ray Brown wrote:

> On Saturday, April 24, 2004, at 05:34 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
>> Hi!
>
>
> Hi!
>
> I apologize if any of what I say seems hostile. It's not intended. We
> seem
> to be speaking at cross purposes and I'm just trying to clarify matters.
>
>> Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> writes:
>
> [snip]
>
>>> IMO it doesn't make sense to talk of nouns & pronouns having one case.
>>> That'd mean all the world's languages decline their nouns & pronouns
>>> which
>>> seems to me counter-intuitive.
>>
>>
>> Hmm, I don't mean by case that the nouns are morphologically changed.
>> E.g. Chinese also has two cases (the one in front of the verb and the
>> one after) but marks none by morphological processes.
>
>
> Ah - we're talking at cross-purposes. You are using 'case' in the
> sense it
> is used in Government-Binding theory; as the late Larry Trask says under
> 'case' in his "A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics":
> "2. In GB, a putatively universal abstract property of noun phrases which
> is an extension of 'case' in sense 1. Every overt NP, in this view, must
> be marked by the grammar as bearing exactly one set of abstract 'Cases',
> the names and nature of which are reminiscent of some of the traditional
> cases in sense 1: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, etc."
>
> 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).

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.

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