Friday, October 21, 2016

Detail #315: Noun-specific Quirky Case

Since I am a fan of various forms of irregularities, I find the idea of quirky case that only applies to particular nouns with particular verbs to be kind of interesting. However, let's phrase it vaguely as 'nominally conditioned quirky case' and we can use this vagueness to generate even more ideas.

Quirky case possession, for instance, could have certain nouns (or even noun-noun combinations) require their possessors to be marked for an exceptional case, or vice versa, certain nouns could be marked for an exceptional case when possessors (despite having a genitive that as far as everything else but possession goes has the same distribution as the genitive for other nouns), or the whole thing requires two nouns that together trigger the quirk.

Quirky case could of course be extended to nouns with adpositions, but this would sort of just be an extension of the previous two - no matter whether the adpositions originate as semantically bleached nouns or verbs, a previous stage exists to account for it.


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