?Papapishu! wrote:Firstly: what are the usual terms for cases that result in something that modifies a noun and cases that result in something that acts adverbially? Is adjectival case/adverbial case okay?
Case(s) which make the so-cased noun or NP modify another noun or NP are called "
adnominal cases", to distinguish them from "
adverbial cases".
The temptation to call
any adnominal case "
genitive" seems to be so strong that some language's adnominal cases are just called "Genitive I", "Genitive II", etc.
Cases which indicate the relationship the so-cased noun or NP has to the verb or VP or clause as a whole are called "
adverbial cases", to distinguish them from "
adnominal cases". These mostly split into "
syntactic cases" vs "
semantic cases"; "syntactic" cases apply to mark the so-cased noun or -cased NP as being in a certain grammatical relation, whereas "semantic" cases apply to mark the so-cased noun or -cased NP as having a certain thematic role within the clause.
The "syntactic cases" are, by Blake, listed as usually being "Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, and Dative" for Accusative languages, "Nominative, Ergative, Genitive, and Dative" for Ergative languages (Blake uses "Nominative" where most people would use "Absolutive"); and I imagine "Nominative, Accusative, Ergative, Genitive, and Dative" for tri-partite languages.
Most "Semantic cases" that I'm aware of are all "adverbial"; the biggest group is probably locative/adessive, allative, ablative, and perlative.
But ISTR (IIRC) there may be a language, or some languages, with a case, or some cases, specially for what we think of as "predicate nominatives".
At least one language has at least one case that applies only to adjectives, not to substantive nouns.
?Papapishu! wrote:
Now, the real question. How do various langs distinguish between these two usages? (Using "case" in a general sense, including affixes and adpositions.)
Every language has the same range of choices:
to the best of my memory they are the following:
* lexical suppletion (like "me" and "I")
* stem modification (like "you" and "your" and "yours")
* affixes (almost always suffixes to indicate Case; but prefixes and infixes and circumfixes and superfixes and transfixes could apply as well, especially for other categories than Case)
* agreement -- some other word is modified to indicate the case of this word (for instance in English, verbs agree only with Subjects, never with Objects)
* periphrasis -- adding a word or clitic (usually an adposition -- a preposition or a postposition or an imposition -- for Case)
* pure syntax -- mostly means "word order" -- e.g. in SVO languages the S and the O might not be differently case-marked, so that "Ess Vees Oh" means "Ess" is the Subject and "Oh" is the Object, whereas "Oh Vees Ess" means "Oh" is the Object and "Ess" is the Subject.
?Papapishu! wrote:
In English, it's done with syntax: the prepositional phrase follows the noun it modifies.
Adverbial: I went to Tokyo. ~ To Tokyo I went.
Adjectival: The road to Tokyo
So, what is the name of the case of "to Tokyo"? Since it modifies the noun "road", it's adnominal; does that mean it can't be the same case as the allative (adverbial) "to Tokyo" in "I went to Tokyo" or "I sent John to Tokyo"? Or is it merely that an allative can have both an adverbial and an adnominal use in English? Or, is it, rather, that the phrase "the road to Tokyo" is basically a clause (maybe something like "the road [over which one would have to travel in order to go] to Tokyo") with a lot of material suppressed (a very Chomskyish solution)?
?Papapishu! wrote:
When the verb has an object, it could theoretically be ambiguous between adverbial and adjectival, but it would be pretty hard to find one that actually is ambiguous.
I didn't understand that sentence. What do you mean? Can you clarify and exemplify?
?Papapishu! wrote:
(Interestingly, the syntax for prepositional phrases is very similar to participles.)
In Japanese, it turns an adverbial case into an adjectival by adding the genitive marker.
Adverbial: T?ky? e itta. (Tokyo ALLATIVE went.)
Adjectival: T?ky? e no michi (Tokyo ALLATIVE GENITIVE road)
In other words, a kind of "case-stacking". This seems extremely natural to me, but many languages do not allow case-stacking; I wouldn't know what was natural in such languages. (My L1 is
_not_ a cased language, so none of it is really "natural" to me, I guess.)
?Papapishu! wrote:
What do other langs do? One possiblity is to replace adjectival cases with relative clauses, so that the case within the clause is still an adverbial one: "The road which goes to Tokyo". Does anyone know of a language where that's the only way of expressing things like this?
I'd like to know, too.
I answered the parts of your post for which I was unable to find answers among those already posted.
I want to know, when you know!
Thanks.
Tom H.C. in MI