Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

Hi!

"Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> writes:
> From:    Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
>...
> > You might now say: ok, then *Chinese* does have case, but other
> > languages don't.  I just fail to see that it is a big difference of
> > using order or morphology.
>
> I guess my great reservation with your argument is that you're
> conflating morphosyntactic issues with cognitive and semantic issues.
I thought I was not mixing up the two levels.  In the case above, I
meant that case used the syntactical instrument of word order.  From
this point of view, it is still so that Chinese can be analysed to
have two 'cases' (or three in the case of 'give'), since the word
order makes them clear.

> The point of both wordorder and case systems (in Trask's first sense) --
> morphosyntactic phenomena -- is not to define meaning, but rather be
> the overt realization of that meaning.
Yes.  Verb A wants two arguments, then word order says which comes
before A and which one after A.  I did not say anything about what it
means and whether they are nom, acc, dat or anything.

(Although this is interesting in Chinese, but that's something else.)

> Your stance, in line with much work in Minimalism-GB-PP work,
> basically asks us to believe that the separate grammatical modules
> are not, in fact, very autonomous of one another because you are
> coding semantics directly into the syntax, rather than putting
> semantics into, well, the semantic module.
No, I'm surely not trying to make anyone believe this.  I like a
strict distinction, too.

> > My current conlang seems to violate the above putative universal
> > because it allows phrases to have case.  I'm sure I've seen natural
> > languages attaching case markers to phrases.
>
> This is a circular argument:  how do you know it actually is a case?
Haha!  You're right.  Sorry! :-)

I did not notice this and actually, this is interesting.  If I called
that 'morphological function markers', would that be ok?  So I need
not argue against case being a morphological category of nouns: simply
one-class languages simply don't have case, since they have no
nouns. :-)

OTOH, what is done by my 'morphological function markers' really is
what is done by case is languages that have nouns. :-)

> > So is case not more a property of arguments and adjuncts?
>
> Your statement again assumes that case is some kind of abstract
> property, rather than an overt realization of thematic roles
> (or other nominal features) as Ray and I have been arguing.  You
> could argue on theory-internal grounds, but those are rarely
> convincing to the nonbeliever.
Yes, you're right, this was not well thought-through.

**Henrik

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