EDIT: reposted because of accidental deletion
Consider a situation wherein the
case systems (or gender systems, or whatever) differ for singulars and
plurals. Now, consider some determiner which semantically is plural-like
but formally singular. This happens, sort of, in English, with the
determiner 'each'.
Now, let's assume that the case system in the plural makes fewer distinctions than it does in the singular, e.g.
- conflates accusative and nominative?
- conflates locative and dative?
- conflates genitive and comitative?
The exact details are irrelevant - come up with them at your own leisure.
Now
comes the twist: the case markers are singular (or at least we omit the
plural marker if we're dealing with a more agglutinating language), but
follow the distribution and function of plural cases. Thus, 'each' is
followed by a formally singular noun with the plural case system.
Similar mismatches can of course be enforced with, say, gender systems
or any other similar thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment