Questions tagged [cases]
Inflectional forms that indicate the grammatical functions of nouns, pronouns and their modifiers (such as adjectives).
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The term for the state of a noun
In linguistics, a case is how a noun declines with respect to its grammatical function within a given phrase, clause, or sentence. Is there a linguistics term to refer to the “state” of a noun within ...
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2answers
45 views
What can explain the appearance of “self-made” language features if neither of languages a person speaks or learns have similar features?
I know a woman, whose native language is Kyrgyz (Turkic family) and who learned Russian as an adult (mostly, maybe she was somewhat exposed to it before as well).
What striked me is that she invented ...
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0answers
33 views
How do I know if ECM happens in a foreign language?
I have learned about ECM and how it works within the English language, but I don't understand it thoroughly. How would we be able to decide whether a language has ECM?
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39 views
How common object/subject case being applied to determiners/demonstrative/articles instead of nouns?
I'm talking about a language where say, a certain case is only expressed on the determiners/demonstrative/article?
So they might say for example:
Which-a Cat?
Which-LOC. Cat?
Rather than:
Which Cat-...
5
votes
3answers
411 views
Is it possible in Sanskrit to distinguish between the names Rāma and Rām i.e. राम and राम् when used in a sentence?
Consider this sentence:
रामो लेखन्या लिखति
Is रामो in that sentence always referring to someone named राम (Rāma) or could it be equally possible that the person's name was राम् (Rām)? Are names like ...
6
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1answer
161 views
Are dative governing verbs in IE languages mainly inherited from PIE, or later developed within each IE language?
Some typical dative governing verbs in many IE case-inflecting languages are "help", "give" etc.. Are they mainly inherited from PIE or are they developed within each language? If ...
6
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3answers
530 views
Is a final -u in Semitic languages known outside of Akkadian?
Consider Akkadian bētu vs. Hebrew bayit (בַּיִת) (meaning "house") and Akkadian daltu vs. Hebrew delet (דֶּלֶת) (meaning "door"). Are these endings known outside of Akkadian? If so, when did they ...
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1answer
34 views
subject of a to-infinitive - is it a nominative or an accusative?
Is the subject of a to-infinitive a nominative, because it's a subject, or an accusative, because it's assigned the Case by 'for'?
The man kept the door open for the cat to enter the room.
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1answer
69 views
A-positions where no structural Case is available?
I am a little puzzled. Is there any such thing as an A-position where no structural Case is available? The arguments are either a nominative or an accusative (structural Cases) aren't they?
[...] ...
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73 views
Two questions about Icelandic (syntax)
The following sentence is from Icelandic language:
Mér vir›ast tNP [hestarnir vera seinir]
meDAT seemPL the-horsesNOM be slow
‘It seems to me that the horses are slow.'
...
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Is there a language where presence/absence of V-O agreement would reflect presence/absence of accusative case?
I am trying to find a language which would show the following pattern with respect to agreement/morphological Case:
presence of verb-object morphological agreement yields accusative morphology
...
0
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1answer
68 views
What is case for pronouns in different positions? [closed]
Can we say "the case of subject in a sentence is nominative, the direct object of a verb is accusative, the second object of a ditransitive verb is accusative, the objective of a preposition is ...
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1answer
1k views
What are the subjective and objective genitives?
I have recently come across the terms subjective genitive and objective genitive, but I don't fully understand them.
From what I have read, an example might be 'the love of God', as in 'the love of ...
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0answers
82 views
What is meant by the term 'genitive of appurtenance'
In his Sanskrit Grammar, William Dwight Whitney describes the uses of the genitive case in Sanskrit and he mentions the 'genitive of possession or appurtenance':
The genitive in its normal ...
8
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4answers
646 views
Do languages with cases frequently have verbs which use particular cases for their objects?
Turkish, German, Russian, Greek and Latin are examples of languages with declension. They also have lists of verbs for which the verb's single object takes a particular case apart from the "normal" ...
1
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1answer
66 views
Global case map
A lot of European languages, especially Finnish (not an INDO European language) have cases. English for the most part doesn’t. Other languages don’t. I have seen maps of grammar features around the ...
3
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2answers
142 views
Case in English phrase “friend of mine”
In English phrases like
Jesse is a friend of mine/*of me
the case of the word "mine" is not the oblique ("me") which usually occurs with prepositions ("That's a part of me that you don't see too ...
3
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3answers
219 views
Case in German Nouns
German has an interesting situation in its noun phrases - articles and adjectives reflect case, but the noun itself does not.
Der große Mann sieht das Haus. ("The big man sees the house," ...
4
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1answer
299 views
Absense of cases in Bulgarian
Nowadays, Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Slavic languages where the system of cases isn't developed. Bulgarian and Macedonian are very close to each other, but are considered to be 2 ...
5
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1answer
634 views
What is the meaning of the Latin names of grammatical cases (in general, not in Latin)?
I cannot find any source explaining the Latin names of grammatical cases. I am especially curious in the names of the less common cases, like in Finnish:
nominative
genitive
accusative
partitive
...
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1answer
97 views
Is Finnish harder than Latin? [closed]
I'm not interested in learning Finnish, but I do have some interest in Latin. I suspect that this is the case (no pun intended) because Latin only has 5 cases (plus a 6th that is used sparingly), but ...
0
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1answer
101 views
How does the Thai language express the instrumental?
In English and many European languages the instrumental is expressed with a preposition:
I eat noodles with chopsticks.
(But "with" is not dedicated to this function and has other uses such as the ...
6
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1answer
199 views
What is the difference between the nominative case and the subject?
I'm studying Japanese and recently I came across the term "double nominatives". The idea is that ga marks the nominative case, so a phrase with two ga has two phrases in the nominative case:
boku ga ...
6
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1answer
117 views
What is considered a grammatical case in the framework of turkic languages?
Let's take kazakh language as an example. In every source I've read there are 7 cases in kazakh language:
nominative úı - a house, laq - goatling;
genitive úı-diń - of a house, laq-tiń - of a ...
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6answers
1k views
What is the difference between case and adpositions?
The preposition expressions like "on top of the table", "under the tree", "above the building" are very well understood. Comparing these with the Germany noun cases "auf dem Tisch", "unter dem Baum", "...
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31 views
Are there languages in which overt morphological accusative case is obligatory on the second conjunct of a conjunction?
For example: (1) The officer believed [NP Mary and me]
Of course, the distribution of ACC pronouns in English doesn't really map onto ACC in overt morphological case languages.
1
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1answer
287 views
Grammatical case vs semantic case
I'm not sure what these terms mean. In my lecture notes I wrote that grammatical case is used to show the syntactic functions of a nominal syntagm, depending on its relation to the verb. Semantic case,...
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1answer
76 views
What cases are typical for nouns accompanying the subject?
In the phrase "I went to the shops with a friend", "a friend" is the accompanier, while I am the subject.
Some languages, such as Finnish (I believe) have a comitative case, which is taken by an ...
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2answers
105 views
Are there other languages, besides Latin, where a gender of a noun is determined by its genitive case ending?
Are there other languages, besides Latin, where a gender of a noun is determined by its genitive case ending?
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1answer
91 views
Is there a name other than “absolute” for this kind of construction?
In some languages there are absolute constructions like the Genitive Absolute in Greek:
Καὶ ἤδη ὥρας πολλῆς γενομένης προσελθόντες αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ ἔλεγον ὅτι ἔρημός ἐστιν ὁ τόπος καὶ ἤδη ὥρα ...
2
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1answer
96 views
Problem with [NOMINATIVE] Case in GB & Phase Theory (MP)
Most of works on case theory in generative syntax GB (Vergnaud, 1985; Chomsky, 1981, 1986, among others) and in MP (Chomsky, 1995, et seq; Gallego, 2010; Hornstein, 2011, among others) assume the ...
1
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1answer
108 views
“To whom” in pied-piped infinitive relative clauses
In English wh raised from, or in situ in, a direct object or prepositional object, you can almost always use "who" at least as well as "whom",1 and in some cases you can only use "who":
Who/whom did ...
2
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0answers
143 views
Direct–inverse marking on the noun, or the possiblity of inverse alignment
A direct-inverse language, Wikipedia claims, is one which
involve[s] different grammar for transitive predications according to the relative positions of their "subject" and their "object" on a ...
2
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1answer
357 views
Drawing case specified trees for english gerunds
I'm reading Adger's Core Syntax book and am having a tough time with Exercise 1 of the functional categories chapter.
The exercise is about gerunds. Gerunds are specified by the form of suffixing -...
2
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1answer
253 views
Should Japanese postpositions be treated as belonging to the same category as English prepositions?
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and WALS, as well as Wikipedia, treat both English prepositions and Japanese postpositions (particles) as belonging to 'adpositions' (although CGEL ...
2
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1answer
73 views
Configurational assignment of accusative case?
I'm an undergraduate linguistics student, and I'm currently reading this chapter by Coon & Preminger (2015) (http://ling.umd.edu/assets/publications/Coon-Preminger-17-SplitErgativity.pdf), which ...
3
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4answers
331 views
How “the case system collapses” in e.g. Latin
A comment on Understanding the purpose of determiners/articles/demonstratives in language suggested that case systems break down:
For unrelated reasons, the case system collapses, so that word ...
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1answer
67 views
Is there a grammatical case indicating displacement?
As part of a constructed language experiment I am trying to write phrases with clause structure of [noun supersedes noun] as just two words. For example, “death before dishonor” or “freedom over ...
0
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1answer
228 views
What does “referentiality” mean?
I have problems with the linguistic terms. I did not find satisfactory explanation
about "referentiality". On the other hand, what are the differences between "case" and "referentiality"? If there is, ...
2
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3answers
196 views
How does 'like a book' befit the Translative, and not Essive, Case?
McWhorter, J. PhD Linguistics (Stanford). The Language Hoax (2016). p. 56 Bottom.
I speak no Estonian. 1. But how does the preposition 'like' conveys the Translative Case? E.g., an encyclopedia ...
3
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1answer
37 views
Case of Nominal Associate in Clauses with Exceptional case-marking
I've been wondering whether the nominal associate of expletive there gets nominative, accusative or dative case in clauses with exceptional case-marking in other languages, since case isn't visible ...
5
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1answer
206 views
Instrumental - nominative inversion in Polish
While scrolling through a course in Polish, I saw the following sentence:
Wynikiem wyrażenia jest nowa relacja. -- *resultant (of the) expression is (a) new relation
This is not the first time I ...
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2answers
585 views
Are there any languages with a case system like Esperanto's?
Thinking about Esperanto's case system, if I saw that in a natural language, I would think it was rather odd.
Esperanto only has two cases: accusative and non-accusative. The non-accusative, on is ...
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2answers
269 views
Doesn't Sanskrit use adpositions of any kind?
For some reason, the Wikipedia article makes no mention of any adpositions of any kind. I find it highly unbelievable that the language makes no use of such. It has a case system, but there's only 8 ...
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2answers
251 views
Grammatical Case for Noun Phrase in English
Consider the sentence:
John's book is blue.
What is the grammatical case of "book" here? The two obvious choices are nominative or genitive.
Most information online suggests it is nominative, ...
22
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4answers
3k views
What is “case”?
As a non-linguist, I am confused about the concept of case. What is its definition, as linguists use it? Is it about the different forms that nouns/pronouns can take? Is it about the function of the ...
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0answers
153 views
What does CGEL mean by 'instability in the system' in their explanation of case?
Consider the following passage from CGEL (p. 458, boldfaced emphasis mine):
We look first at the contrast between nominative and accusative case, where we find a considerable amount of variation ...
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0answers
74 views
List of Hungarian toponyms by interior/surface case
Hungarian toponyms can be grouped grammatically according to whether they take the "interior" cases (inessive, illative, and elative) or the "surface" cases (superessive, sublative, and delative) to ...
3
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1answer
165 views
Do case endings really make sentences shorter?
In the Language Construction Kit, Mark Rosenfelder makes the claim that case endings 'makes things compact and frees up word order'. The latter is pretty obvious, but do case endings really make ...
3
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2answers
85 views
Is there a language where in declension number is affixed peripherally to case?
Is there a language where, given that number and case are affixed seperately not fusionally, a noun can have the structure of , e.g. ithawen = itha-w-en [woman]+GEN+PL ("of the women, the women's")? I ...
