Saturday, October 3, 2015

Detail #215: Quirky Case Participles

It would be pretty cool to have verbs that take quirky case to have the quirky case carry over to the participles as well. So, e.g. to lack takes an object in the ablative; thus:
I lack common sense-abl
Now, we go on to talk about the common sense which is lacking:
the lacked common sense-abl prevented him from a good career
In most languages, sense would be whatever case prevent takes for its subject in this context. Notice, however, that this may let us drop the idea of active and passive participles for those participles that have quirky case arguments. (If we go and have nominative and accusative covered by this too, we've kind of broken nominative and accusative with regards to normal sentence structure, so let us not go there – feels like if the case system entirely breaks down at that level, it won't survive at the participle-level either.)

Of course, we could have some limited suffixaufnahme going as well - i.e. stacked case markers, one for agreement with the participle, one for agreement with the main verb.

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