zompist bboard

OK, is there a reason certain cases don't seem to be attested? I mean like "location above" and "movement beside/past" among a few others I can think of. Some of the unattested cases are really common as adpositions too (like "over/above" and "besides"). This makes me think it might not be such a good idea to turn every adposition into a case, or an applicative either (although, with applicatives, there are definitely some things you just don't find, like specifically malefactive applicatives, or ones meaning "like an x", I would think anything locative would be wide open for use).

If you decide to render all relationships of location as cases, I wonder, though, whether it wouldn't be easier (or more common) to analyze your cases as actually being adpositions.

Well, what if you have case concord? I've never heard of adposition concord.

Very true.

Isn't "location above" the superessive case, approximately? Or is it not used that way in the languages that have one?

I don't know much about this topic. My impression was that languages with large case inventories, like the Uralic languages, are less likely to have case marked in multiple places in the noun phrase, but I don't know if this is a real tendency or not.

Well, most of the time I see a suppressive case, it means "on (the surface of)", not over/above.

Some languages with lots of cases do have case concord though. The Uralic languages I've studied (which isn't much, as I'm not really into Uralic) have it, and some languages I've studied with large case inventories have not only case concord with adjectives but also suffixaufnahme.

HoskhMatriarch wrote:Some languages with lots of cases do have case concord though. The Uralic languages I've studied (which isn't much, as I'm not really into Uralic) have it.

I see! The only Uralic language I've studied at all is Hungarian, where the situation is sufficiently unclear that someone (Andrew Spencer) wrote an article called "Does Hungarian have a case system?"

Apparently, there are actually a few circumstances that appear to show case concord (numerals and demonstratives), but these can all be analyzed as two noun phrases in apposition (and the same type of "doubling" occurs with phonologically independent postpostions; Spencer gives the example of e mögött a ház mögött "this behind the house behind" "behind this house").

Let's not forget the Northeast Caucasian trick of marking location (in, above, beside) and direction (to, from, through) on the noun. 'Movement beside' would be expressed by the combination 'beside-along'.

It's at least partially, I presume, due to the fact that most languages don't have all that many cases - less than 10% have more than 10, around half have three or fewer. "over" simply isn't that near the top of the list of concepts you want to express all that frequently, so it loses out.

Note that many of these potential cases are better expressed with the combination of a relational noun and another case rather than creating cases for every possibility.