English has a particular nice quirk with regards to this - one that I am not familiar with any other European language having, viz. possessive pronouns distinguishing when they're determiners (my car) or when they're standing alone (mine's bigger than yours). In other languages, the same distinction clearly is maintained, but not by ways that make the independent form distinct.
Let's go on and consider how other kinds of cases also can be used attributively - the bottle on the shelf, the house by the gorge, etc. So, how about permitting a kind of extended use of pretty much all the cases. This can get a bit tricky.
Suddenly, a sentence like "by the gorge burned down last night" could make sense in the right context (since everyone in the village knows about there being that house referred to as by the gorge). How do we disambiguate this? How do we know we didn't just miss the proper subject? And here we reach my usual trick - discongruence.
If we have some noun class system combined with a case system, let's just drop the class congruence. I might use this in Tatediem, but have non-nominatives trigger the 'grammatical class' on verbs.
This also opens up the chance of using case as a kind of derivative thing - you could easily imagine lots of place-names to have derived from locative cases, house-names from genitives or locatives, comitatives being used to designate spouses (in the case that the name is not yet known or for some reason the other spouse is favored for whatever reason - sexism, obviously, could be a cultural trait that could lead to such).
How do we deal with these when needed in other contexts than as subjects or objects with either entirely omitted congruence or some special congruence marker (along the lines of the Tatediem "grammatical class", which also contains a bunch of other things such as numbers, conjunctions-as-nouns, etc)?
If the language is mainly verb-framed, the problem should be solved quite well - if you're approaching "at the gorge", you'll probably be able to contextually figure out whether it's actually the house at the gorge or the gorge itself you are approaching - with many possible cases having both be true, with the caveat that approaching the house probably is the more salient true meaning. Obviously, you could also have the language omit the case (in favor of accusative or whatever) when you're approaching the gorge itself, and go with the locative only when using it in a locative-derivative manner.
Satellite-framing obviously would work less well, unless you go in for the rather inelegant solution of having double case marking or adpositions that treat case-inflected nouns as though they were entirely run-off-the-mill NPs.
Verbs of movement and such can of course have further locative things happening - you may be approaching something at the gorge. In this case, I figure a language with a system along these lines would prefer some parsing rule - either the direct object is parsed as what is being approached and the location is parsed as a locative adverb; alternatively, whichever thing is closest to the verb is assumed to be the direct object. Or finally, in the case you're approaching at the gorge at the birch forest (which would seem weird in the small imaginary village I have as a mental model right now for the speakers of this language, since the house at the gorge is nowhere near the birch forest, so the speaker must be narrating a dream or something he was confused about, or maybe at the gorge was being pulled by horses to a new place, where it'd still retain its name, now a misnomer), there might be a hierarchy of which case-inflected noun to parse as the approached object and which to parse as the wider location - or it might be affected by more pragmatics-related issues, such as whether at the gorge already has been established in the discussion as having an antecedent. This will leave gaps in what you can approach where (or whatever other verb whatever other object at/with/by/... whatever other location or thing, obviously, but that is also an interesting thing to consider more generally.)
Mmm... Plenty of inaccuracies in this post, in my humble opinion.
ReplyDeleteFirst, you say that you're not aware of other European languages having possessives that distinguish between being determiners or standing alone. In that case, I'm curious which European languages you know, because the ones I do know distinguish those cases just as well. In French, "mon" vs. "le mien" is just has different as "my" vs. "mine" (I'd even argue it's even easier to distinguish!). Spanish has "mi" vs. "el mío", also extremely easy to distinguish. Even Dutch has "mijn" vs. "de mijne", also quite easy to distinguish.
Second, why do you reject double case marking as "inelegant"? It's actually a very elegant solution to the problem you pose, one that is used a bit in English (see the expression "at Joe's", where a genitive is used with an adposition, a very elegant solution in my opinion), although the language most well known for using this strategy is Basque (French grammarians call it "surdéclinaison"). The ability to add inflections to already inflected forms not only shortens expressions, but it allows one to cover a wide semantic space with a nice, small morphological apparatus. What's inelegant about that?
To take your example ("the house by the gorge"). You go through all kinds of contortions to ensure the attributive "by the gorge" suddenly refers to what it's completing. What's wrong with the Basque solution to simply nominalise it by adding the determiner "-a" to the attributive "sakanko": "by the gorge", getting thus from "sakanko etxea": "the house by the gorge" to "sakankoa": "the one by the gorge"? The result can then be inflected like any other noun in Basque: "sakankorantz": "towards the one by the gorge" (the "-a" disappears before local cases). Nice, tidy, completely unambiguous, impossible to confuse with just "towards the gorge" (that'd be "sakanerantz"). You need context to know what "sakankorantz" refers to exactly, but that's not any worse than with "at Joe's".
Really, what's inelegant about such a simple, powerful solution? Aren't you throwing the baby with the bath water?
1) It's not an inaccuracy if it's a statement about what I know. I know very little about Romance languages and indeed Dutch, as my interests have been somewhat more interested in Slavic and Finnic languages. Are the French and Spanish (and Dutch) examples formed analogously to how adjectives are treated?
ReplyDelete2) I reject double case marking as inelegant simply because it's such an obvious solution! Grammar that takes the easy way out does happen, but if conlanging is all about taking the easy way out, realism falls by the wayside. I want to showcase options that aren't all that obvious. I am not saying there's anything wrong with it, I am just saying there are other ways. Ways that create puzzles in the grammar. And if you know enough about language, you'll know similar kinds of puzzles appear in all of them.