Differential case marking is something that to me is mainly associated with:
- subjects and objects (c.f. Turkish or Finnish objects, Turkish subjects of some infinitive verb types; also, fluid-S languages kind of qualify for this!)
- adpositions (Latin, German, Russian, Greek, etc prepositions)
- some kinds of secondary subjects (e.g. the agent that is caused to do something with some types of causative constructions)
Conversely, the features I associate it with are:
- negative vs. positive
- aspect (telic vs. atelic, for instance)
- direction vs. location (the adposition thing)
- definiteness (Turkish object and (infinitive) subject marking)
- volition (fluid-S)
- in some Finnish causatives, "permit X to ..." vs. "have X do ...", so basically sort of volition again?
Could we go for some different things? For contexts where differential case could make sense, how about:
- relative pronouns
- resumptive pronouns
- interrogative pronouns
- reflexive pronouns pronouns
With relative and resumptive, we could consider for, say, subjects and objects, whether the relative clause is restrictive or not. For interrogative pronouns, a relevant distinction could be analogous to what vs. which. For reflexives, maybe reflexive vs. reciprocal.
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