Ćwarmin: How to distinguish a clitic postposition from a case

Ćwarmin has a rich system of cases, which to some extent form fusional forms with number and the definiteness system. Ćwarmin also has a rather rich system of postpositions which are not considered cases. What makes one set considered cases and the other set not?

The Ćwarmin cases can be found here. However, nearly all Ćwarmin postpositions also are suffixed (and the prepositions are prefixed) to words. There are, however, certain traits that distinguish them. Some suffixes are sometimes cases, sometimes not.

1. Possible carriers

Postpositions are less picky than cases. They go on the final word of a noun phrase, regardless of what that is. Cases can only go on nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numbers. However, some postpositions also have case suffixes on them, often showing their origin as nouns, adjectives or pronouns.
(Make up etymologies for "apart (from)", "together with", "between" and some others).

apart from: -źəd-ir (egəd 'roads' + plural general ablative)
"roads away (from each other)"
together with: -xədəŋ-ic
between: -xədəŋ-ijn (xədəŋ is related to the adaŋ-morpheme in numerals)

Similarly, only cases distinguish the paucal from the plural, or the specific from the definite. Postpositions tend to go on the accusative stem, but one also find examples of general ablative, the dative or the instrumental or negative, with the occasional comitative-to thrown in. Sometimes, a postposition will take a different case in the plural than in the singular. Postposition-case pairings are not entirely regular: there seems to be both a lexical component which is basically a parameter to a probabilistic parameter. In addition, many of the postpositions cause some morphological wear at the end of the suffix, sometimes making it unclear which case is involved. Factors which affect the postposition-case pairing are:

* the more individuated the noun, the more likely to be dative it is
* the more involved despite lack of volition, the more likely to be instrumental
* negations, absence, etc tend to favour the negative case
* the comitative-to sometimes is used to emphasize a noun as being central to the events or important
* the general ablative tends to be lexically determined by some nouns to appear in the plural
* the dative tends to be lexically determined by some verbs to appear with the postposition

Only in the case where a postposition goes on the accusative or general ablative stem is there any suspicion that they're actually cases.

2. Morphological position

Postpositions go after all the other suffixes of a word. Postpositions can, however, take their own suffixes. Cases go after derivational suffixes, and after case-number-definiteness*.

* Ćwarmin grammatical tradition is to consider the whole case-number-definiteness-complex a single marker, despite clear agglutination.

3. Behavior over gaps and ellipses

This, in particular, is the behavior where some cases in some constructions behave like cases, and in other constructions do not. Adpositions in Ćwarmin can mark a whole coordinated phrase, case can only mark one noun phrase each:

milt-əneś (ul) mar-ummona
[milti-əneś (ul) maruw-ummona]
"for liver (and) kidneys"
*milti ul mar-ummona

*wekre (ul) pokr-oku
wekr-iki (ul) pokr-oku
with garlic and onion

Two cases that have different behaviors in different contexts are the negative and the general ablative. The singular dative can also showcase both in a few particular constructions, e.g. with verbs for 'resemble x.dat', and other verbs of perception where something the stimulus is compared to is in the dative, it seems both case-like and case-unlike use is permissible for many speakers.

3.1 The negative

The negative, when communicating an abessive/caritive meaning, does not seem to be a proper case, but rather a postposition. Thus, you could get

wekre dar pokr-usta
garlic nor onion-without
without garlic and onion

but as subjects or objects,
*wekre dar pokr-usta ogm(o)-ur-ka źub-u
garlic nor onion stone-from-in grow-3sg

wekr-istə (dar) pokr-usta ogm-ur-ka źub-u
neither garlic nor onion grow from stone

4. Interactions with the reflexive accusative

Most postpositions can interact with the reflexive(ly possessed) accusative. Thus

wicxə-sin (my/your/his/her/... (own) house)
wicxə-sin-rede (behind my/your/his/her/... (own) house)
*wicxə-sin-itite (of ... (own) house)

Thus we can see that -rede, "behind" is a postposition, whereas -itite is not. The negative can combine with the reflexive possessive accusative whenever it is of a postpositional construction as well.

5. Congruence with numerals

The congruence with numerals is limited already, and is sometimes blocked by other case-marking constructions. However, the case suffixes do not participate in it at all, and only the case of the noun itself prior to case suffixing can affect case marking of numerals.

6. Fusionality

Fusionality with number and definiteness is generally not required to be a case, but if it is present, it is a case. All numbers that have such fusion have all the other hallmarks.

7. Coordination of postpositions

Postpositions can be coordinated, cases cannot:

bećəś-xədəŋ-ic ej-źəd-ir
you-together_with or_apart_from

*xarsab-ac-ak:a ej-enek:e
*the roof-on or-onto
*on or onto the roof

Bryatesle: Adpositions vs. Location and some thoughts on Subjecthood and Adpositions

I will be talking about a technical notion of subject for a lot of this post, but at times, I will need to also refer to a less technical notion of subject. Not quite topic, since it's clearly not a role that can be filled by any old NP, nor necessary is it the topical NP. It rather is some vague notion of the quality that distinguishes the NP which in some way is active, whose state or change thereof the verb describes or whose active part in the interaction with some other NP or itself is expressed by the verb. Subjects are defined by certain subjecthood tests, but would almost all exhibit that vague notion (except maybe the subjects of passive verbs), but not all nouns that exhibit these vague notions are strict subjects, nor would pass subjecthood tests.

I will call any NP that carries these vague notions - including proper subjects - subjectids, and any subjectid that is not a subject is a subjectoid.

Proto-BDS did not strictly speaking have grammatical subjects, and their evolution in all the daughter languages showcases traces of the pre-subject state of the language. This statement requires a rather technical notion of what a subject even is, but for now, let's look at what NPs in Bryatesle with any kind of certainty are proper subjects, starting at the most certain:

1st and 2nd person pronouns that trigger verb congruence
proper nouns pertaining to humans that trigger verb congruence

These are, in all analyses, beyond doubt  as far as subjecthood goes.

Third person pronouns with human referents that trigger verb congruence are almost certain to be subjects as well

Here, congruence only really helps determine those cases where explicit congruence is present, e.g. plurals or non-neuters. (The neuter congruence is in fact a kind of zero congruence, as can be seen with the many instances where a verb gets neuter congruence despite no neuter argument being present).

A verb lacking a subject does not necessarily signify that no one or nothing is doing that, or even that who- or whatever is doing is not present in the clause. It simply means there is no noun phrase present with certain syntactical properties - it cannot control reflexives, it cannot undergo certain syntactical operations, it cannot be relativized, etc.

Now, this lax subjectness can be seen with inanimate masculine or feminine subjects:

aryk	tëk	-u	të-	-tyrn	-ai
winter	you	acc	RESLT	kill	3sg neuter
winter	you		(will)	kill

winter will kill you

The non-subjectness of aryk, winter, is not obvious from the example above, but  if we change the structure of the clause a bit we find for instance, the following permissible construction:

ark-ity tëk-u të-tyrn-ai

ark	-ity	tëk	-u	të	-tyrn	-ai
winter	ABL	you	ACC	RSLT	kill	3sg neuter
winter	-from	you		(will)	kill

winter will kill you

It turns out most inanimate nouns can be somewhat subject-like even in the ablative and dative cases.

A similar lack of subjecthood even occurs with intransitive verbs, and we find, for instance, that verbs like 'cease, end', 'begin' or 'last' basically can take an inanimate subjectoid in any case, but is more picky with the case marking on animate subjects. Plural animates may also behave as subjectoids at times, and this seems to correlate with the extent to which the plural animates act as a group or as a bunch of independent agents. Funnily enough, the 'independent agents' end of the spectrum behaves more like inanimate subjectoids than like animate subjects; it seems there is, among Bryatesle speakers a sense that the less internally organized a plural NP is, the less it is like an animate NP.

Neuter nouns fall even lower, however, on the rank of animacy, than inanimate feminine and masculine nouns, and it seems this is the reason why a separate ergative construction has emerged specifically for them. The assumption has been so strong when parsing that a neuter noun is an object if the verb is not intransitive. We shall divert our attention for a while to the formation of the ergative case:

Neuter nouns, when subjects of transitive verbs, take a masculine nominative pronoun as a particle. This pronoun is somewhat phonologically reduced, and comes immediately before the noun. Adjectives preceding the noun mark masculine congruence.

A piece of evidence that quirky case subjectoids are proper subjects in Bryatesle emerge in some dialects: quirky case neuter noun subjects of ~transitive verbs in fact also take the masculine pronoun – in some dialects in the appropriate quirky case, in some only the noun (and adjectives!) are marked for the appropriate quirky case. This could arguably be called 'quirky ergative case'.

Now that we have looked at the notions of subjectids and subjectoids, let's delve further into a different relation that oftentimes is one between two nouns; that encoded by adpositions. An adposition can relate not just a verb to a noun, e.g. telling the location of a verb's occurrence, but also of nouns related to that verb, or even more specifically, telling us about the location or direction of a noun. Like with subjectids, we sometimes get nouns displaced from their adposition, either due to them being fronted as topics, or due to some other noun being more strongly attracted to the adposition. Maybe we could name this relation anchors in lack of any better term. We get a similar set of anchors, anchoroids, anchorids. 

The oblique/obliquid/obliquoid generally sort of is analogous to the object of a verb phrase, but sometimes, an adposition also has something similar to a subject as well - e.g. in simple statements of where something is - "John is in Western Papua". In English - and mostly in Bryatesle - such NPs are not just similar to subjects, they are subjects. However, we do get situations where the notional subject of the adpositional phrase is not the subject of the VP:

I put the bottles in the refrigerator
The children found berries in the forest

Bryatesle has a tendency of not wanting to have the topic be the object of an adposition, but it also has a tendency of not wanting to have adpositions without NPs. Thus, if we were to topicalize 'refrigerator', we would get the following transformations:

I put [bottle.acc.] [[refrigerator.dat.def] in]
→ refrigerator.dat.def I [put bottle.acc] [[_____(.dat.def)] in]
→ refrigerator.dat.def I [Ø →] [[put bottle.dat] in] 

Secondary case is not as closely tied to morphosyntax as primary case is, and so does not carry over, whereas the primary case is morphosyntactical in nature, and therefore the erstwhile 'subject' of the postposition now does adopt the case the object previously had, but usually remains on the left-hand side of the adposition.

In some sense, verbs and objects behave in a similar manner here: verbs push certain types of subjectids away from being actual subjects, but rather some kind of oblique argument with subject-like properties. Somethings, postpositions push anchorids away from being anchors and into being oblique objects with anchor-like properties.

However, looking at it from a different direction they seem very different:

Verbs permit non-subject subjectoid nouns to be parsed as agents, and do not require syntactic gaps to be filled. Postpositions do not permit gaps, but permit anchors to become objects in order to fill them.

This treatment is probably a bit too technical, but this should be read as a policy statement rather than an actual grammatical treatment. This is a post clearing up some of my thoughts on this issue, attempting to form a coherent idea of the Bryatesle subjects

Detail #391: A Number

And by 'a number', I mean a grammatical number. Not a new integer or uniquely weird algebraic entity in some odd field or algebra.

So, let's consider the paucal. This is of course a familiar number, I bet, to most readers. A plural of few. We can consider some potential twists to spice this number up! I doubt combining too many of these in one language works, but potentially some of them may combine. If other numbers also take up some of the

1. Using it with comparatives or superlatives.
In a language with plurals and paucals, and also comparatives and superlatives, comparing sizes of finite sets becomes trivial: comparative on a noun in the paucal means 'fewer', comparative on a noun in the plural means 'more'.  The superlative can of course extend this in trivial ways.

2. Using it to signify 'too few'
One could imagine using a marker that derives, say adverbs or maybe a case marker such as instrumental (or just any case), to signify 'too few'. This could of course also extend to 'too little', and produce a situation where mass nouns only have singular forms and an instrumental paucal.

3. 'one out of', 'a few out of'
One could imagine a situation where partial inclusion of the referent (man, am I trying to sound technical?) is always done by use of the paucal. Here, one could imagine that e.g. the case system or the congruence system intentionally 'breaks' a bit whenever this happens. Since there's so many potential scenarios in my mind right now, I will need to describe them a bit.
We shall call this the 'paucal partitive'.

3.1 Northern Eurasian-style case systems
We could imagine that the paucal partitive is restricted only to some syntactical roles. Let's say objects and subjects.

We could imagine that the paucal noun is exceptionally in the genitive for subject and object (or some other non-canonical subject or object cases). We could also imagine that the congruence on the verb has a number mismatch.

3.2 Noun Class Congruence systems
We could imagine that the congruence for the partitive paucal is reset to some inanimate/default type, or potentially to the singular of the relevant noun-class. This might apply even if we're referring to more than one member of the group.

Conversely, we could imagine paucal congruence on a verb with plural marking on the noun phrase? In this case, the construction would conserve noun class but not number. We can, however, imagine that this particular structure would demand that the NP and the verb congruence only differ by one step in the hierarchy plural > paucal > singular.

3.3 Other discongruences:
We can imagine that numerals, adjectives, articles, etc are discongruent in number, case or animacy, and even gender.

We could imagine that the paucal partitive construction also is considered syntactically non-canonical, and sufficiently so as to alter the transitivity of the verb, leading to the use of valency-reducing morphology on the verb, even if the syntactical situation is conserved (e.g. the paucal partitive subject still is the subject, and the object is still the object, despite a passive marker having been introduced on the verb).

3.4. Alignment change
We could imagine that the use of the genitive paucal for partitive paucal subjects could trigger a change in alignment. This use could also well use some kind of infinitive (participle or verb-noun or whathaveyou), and there you go - split ergativity. Split ergativity with objects seems less likely, but could maybe arise from the use of the same participle or verb-noun after the paucal partitive use of the participle has been well-enough established, then extending to the nominative paucal as object of the participle.

Detail #367: Neutral Participles

Consider participles that are not marked for voice at all. (Note: the English past vs. present participles are rather passive vs. present, although the way English participles work is a bit more complicated than that.) Now, such participles could behave in different ways depending on how we want to structure the language - animacy hierarchies, for one, could be a very natural approach to how to parse them.

However, let's go for something less obvious, but still pretty obvious: let's have the case role of the NP with regards to a finite VP also double as its role for the participle:

the man sold the castrate-PTCPL horse:
horse is the object of sold, so it's also the object of castrate, thus:
the man sold the castrated horse

the travel-PTCPL man made a bid:
man is the subject of offer, and therefore also of travel, thus:
the travelling man made a bid

What can we do with this? One obvious potential restriction could be one of only permitting this to work for arguments – non-argument adverbials and such seem less likely to have their 'role' passed on to a participle. 

A second thing we could do is make the role that is passed on to the participle be less carefully differentiated - maybe not distinguishing objects from indirect objects or somesuch.

Here, a light ergativity could be introduced: intransitive participles could be accepted as 'active' participles for objects of transitive verbs.

To make the system more flexible, one could use resumptive pronouns in the desired case, which could lead to a neat way of turning case markers into voice markers.

I had an idea on ergativity and participles, that I have since forgotten. I am hopeful that I might be able to reconstruct it fully and post it soon enough.

Detail #364: Inverse Case Marking

Something that looks sort of vaguely like this if you squint really hard is attested in real languages, but let's make a more distilled form of it. Consider the most core case distinction in many languages - nominative vs. everything else. Some nouns are more likely to be subjects whenever both a subject and some other NP is present, some are more likely to be objects. We basically get a subjecthood hierarchy, which quite probably is not very unlike an animacy hierarchy.

I imagine that this language has but two cases, and the case of the direct object is also used with adpositions and for any oblique uses. Possession could go any which way, maybe with the subject case being the genitive case as well.

For nouns high up in the hierarchy, the nominative is unmarked, and the accusative is marked. Lower down in the hierarchy, the situation is reversed.

Let us use the same case marker for both and call this the 'INV' case.

I see you.INV
man sees stone
knight fought windmill
windmill.INV killed knight.INV

In intransitive clauses, this offers several options. First a nominative-like approach and an ergative-like approach exist. The nominative approach would have subjects marked the same as in transitive clauses, thus

windmill.INV burns
man falls

 The ergative approach would instead produce this outcome:

windmill burns
man.INV falls

We now need to provide an analysis of what's going on under the hood of this system. The nouns will be given two 'classes' – ones high up in the hierarchy are 'I', and lower ones 'II'.

		I	II
nominative		direct	inverse
accusative		inverse	direct

The ergative situation is similarly

		I	II
ergative		direct	inverse
absolutive		inverse	direct

The final situation we can consider is an underlyingly tripartite system

		I	II
transitive subject		direct	inverse
intransitive subject		?	?
transitive object		inverse	direct

This provides us with many options! We can now introduce a split-S type of thing, and we can even do that in multiple ways. We can let 'inverse' signal lack of volition (or whatever, but that's a good go-to example), or we can let the opposite of the transitive subject marking signal lack of volition. Thus, we may have a situation where:

I.INV fall
signals lack of volition, but
fish jump
signals volition, OR

I.INV fall
signals lack of volition BUT
fish.INV jump
signals volition

Fluid-S is afaict typologically less common than a lexically-conditioned split-S,  but fluid-S is easier to make a toy system out of in just a couple of words. For a lexically-conditioned system, way more options exist, of course: some verbs maybe require direct from all nouns, some require inverse, and some require object marking (thus direct from type II nouns and inverse from type I nouns). Basically, the types of language you can imagine form the following set:

Take as possible verb types the set V, consisting of :
D = verbs requiring direct subjects
I = verbs requiring inverse subjects
O = verbs requiring object-forms out of their subjects
S = verbs requiring subject-forms out of their subjects

The languages we can imagine then forms the set P(V), i.e. the power set of {D,I,O,S}. This is {{}, {D}, {I}, {O}, {S}, {DI}, {DO}, {DS}, {IO}, {IS}, {OS}, {DIO}, {DIS}, {DOS}, {IOS}, {DIOS}}.

A language described by the set {IOS} would then be one that has verbs requiring inverse case subjects, verbs requiring object forms and verbs requiring subject forms.

We can also have a situation where all subjects of intransitive verbs just are direct - i.e. no marking whatsoever.

		I	II
transitive subject		direct	inverse
intransitive subject		direct	direct
transitive object		inverse	direct

A situation where both I and II are inverse for the intransitive subject is conceivable, but unlikely and not significantly different from this situation - it would merely be a 'cosmetic' difference.

We can also have a situation where the cut-off between I and II is different for the intransitive subject than for the other two (heck, one could experiment with having that cut-off  in different spots for subjects and objects too!) 

And of course, we can always add in complications with regards to topics - maybe all topics are unmarked regardless of syntactical role?

Detail #363: A (Double-)Quartet of Impossible Cases

These cases probably do not exist in any language

The cases form a two by two system as far as their features go. Consider the result of subject gaps over coordination in languages with syntactic ergativity:

she hit him and ___ ran
run takes an absolutive argument, him is the absolutive of hit, thus it is implicitly him doing the running.

We could overrule this by a case marking either on the "normally ergative" or "normally absolutive" noun - a form of differential case marking. Thus we get two sorts: the puissant ergative  or the compliant absolutive. "Puissant" because it overpowers the absolutive, "compliant" because it cedes to the ergative. Either one should by its existence make the other one superfluous. However, what other uses could they have?

The puissant ergative could maybe appear with causatives? The compliant absolutive could appear with non-volitional intransitives?

I actually see a potentially possible grammaticalization path for the compliant absolutive: a merger with an absolutive pronoun referring to the ergative subject. If the language has a really weird word order, a similar solution for the puissant ergative could be imaginable. The reason I suspect these to be impossible is that they are nouns telling us information about the next clause's verb, and even more so the compliant absolutive is telling us a non-thing: it's telling us which noun isn't the subject, and isn't even necessarily involved.

The next pair of cases would be the analogous forms for nominative-accusative languages: the compliant nominative and the puissant accusative.

These could have similar origins as those in the ergative scenario. However, one might expect these too to have additional uses, such as the compliant nominative maybe always being the subject of passives.

Another thing that often is influenced by alignment is pronoun binding, esp. wrt reflexives and such. We can imagine puissant ergatives and accusatives to control the reflexive pronouns (out of which possessive reflexive pronouns might be the most interesting), or compliant absolutives and nominatives to cede their control of the reflexive pronouns.

Further thoughts in imaginary typology: would there be a (vague) correlation between puissantness and definiteness? How about compliantness and indefiniteness?

EDIT: four additional cases appear if you consider the situation of erg/abs languages with nom/acc syntax (giving compliant ergatives or puissant absolutives), or the case of nom/acc languages with erg/abs syntax (WHICH PROBABLY DON'T EXIST SO DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME FOLKS) (giving  compliant accusatives or puissant nominatives).

A final, late EDIT:
Obviously, these should probably rather be seen as functions of some certain cases than as cases unto themselves, i.e. you'd expect some other  cases to fill these roles. That of course is also sort of up to how they came about - I imagine a compliant nominative could morphologically be the same as the accusative, for instance.

Detail #345: Alignment-Thing with Locative Cases

Let's consider (and extend) the notion of cases for nouns located somewhere, and nouns heading somewhere. I.e. this wouldn't be "the man is at the lake", this would be "the man who ats is (at, with regards to) the lake" or some other silly way of expressing it. Let's consider how this interacts with

• subjects vs. objects and alignment more generally
• more metaphorical uses (e.g. becoming, being, being averb, going to verb)
• indirect objects and such
• more general effects throughout the language

Ok, so we come up with two cases, the stationary case and the motionary case. The stationary case is used when we state that the subject (or object) is located somewhere, or that the object is located somewhere as a result of a static VP: e.g.

A holds B.stat (in place)
A encloses B.stat
A contains B.stat

The motionary case is used whenever motion is involved, obviously:

A.mot approaches B
A.mot runs
A.mot leaves B

but also when A sets B in motion:

A scared B.mot (away)
A threw B.mot
A pushed B.mot

Verbs like 'leave' and 'come' may not be distinguished, and are not strictly speaking morphologically distinguished either: both involve a motionary subject, and both involve motion (obviously). Adverbs may serve to indicate the direction, but also context. As far as cases go, this seems to behave entirely unlikely both subject and object marking, and one would expect there to be some kind of object marking (or ergative marking) to balance this system up, so that the non-motionary non-stationary argument's role can be unambiguously parsed. However, it's not entirely unconceivable that each verb's semantics is clear enough that no subject/object distinction is needed: the motionary/stationary and the unmarked noun may well have easily parsed roles.

As for more metaphorical uses, we can consider the way many languages use locative expressions with infinitives, similar to how the 'to' in 'to VERB' became part of the infinitive construction in English. At this point we can consider the regular locative as 'being averbing', and the lative as 'going averbing'. In this case, a subject that is averbing would be stationary, and one that is going averbing would be motionary. However, in causative utterances (or utterances of, say, seeing someone verbing) the causee (or the object) could easily be in the stationary, or motionary, depending on the aspect and tense and whatnot of the situation.

Detail #343: Places to Put Differential Case Markings

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.

Detail #317: Indirect Object Marking and Possessive Suffixes

Many languages have possessive suffixes. There's some kind of semantic similarity between being a recipient or indirect object and being a possessor. These could easily be marked in similar ways on an NP - i.e. the recipient could be marked on the object, the possessor on any NP.

The grammaticalization path here might be pretty obvious: indirect object pronouns get fused to the direct object noun, and turn into affixes. Trivial, no? 

An obvious result could be identical markers, so

I gave (away?) your car = I gave you the car

The other possibility of course distinguishes the two, although we can of course limit the amount of distinctions made - maybe indirect object markers cannot be reflexive, and the second person plural conflates indirect object and possessor, or whatever.

Now we can start doing fun things - if our markers are distinct, they're also case markers – their presence indicates that an NP is a direct object. Now, we could imagine a double marking here, where both possessive and IO markers can appear simultaneously on a noun, turning

I gave away your car ≠ I gave you the car

Now, this could be sort of different from case marking, though, when interacting with passivization! For passive verbs, maybe this marking remains whenever the direct object is made subject, but disappears when the indirect object is made subject.

ANADEWs #2: The Finnish Object Case and its Complications

One sort of ANADEWy thing about Finnish is the case marking of the object, once you get down to the really fine-grained details. This post will first introduce the basic setup, and then go on with the worse bits.

The Finnish object case is determined in part by a semantic component, basically best illustrated by this schematic:

	telic	atelic
negative	part	part
affirmative	acc	part

Telicity is akin to perfectivity, but not quite the same thing. In school, I was taught the term "resultative" rather than telic. Basically, it is telic if these two semantic conditions hold:

• the action is talked of as achieving or having achieved the intended result, and
• the result of the action is the thing we're focusing on, not the progress of the action itself.
  

The accusative has a further complication, and this complication is syntactically conditioned. First of all, the nominative and accusative are identical in the plural, which means that basically, this decision algorithm is unnecessary there.

In the singular, the accusative is identical to the genitive. (However, some sources state this as 'there's an accusative I and an accusative II, the first being identical to the genitive, the other to the nominative.) If the verb is passive, or the subject is not in the nominative, the object will instead be in the accusative-nominative.

 

The main syntactic deciding factor is whether a VP can have a nominative subject. This might sound like a weird thing not to have, but there are a few types of constructions where nominative subjects are not possible in Finnish: several modal auxiliaries are quirky case verbs, and thus take the subject in the genitive. Imperatives cannot take nominative subjects. Passives cannot take nominative subjects. There are also some iffy bits about infinitives.

The decision flow for object case runs:

1. is the statement telic and affirmative?

yes? ↓       no? ↳ partitive

2. is it possible to have a nominative subject for that particular VP?

no? ↓   yes? ↳ accusative (genitive if singular, nom-acc if plural)

accusative (nominative if singular, nom-acc if plural)

The schematic above omits the whole question of infinitives, but by and large it is accurate. One could add an extra branch for plurals before 2, simplifying the reasoning for plurals but adding one extra step whenever it's a singular. I figure having a uniform decision algorithm is better.

 

Here are some examples:

Erkki osti auton
Erkki buy-past(3sg) car.gen
Since the result here - obtaining the car - is sort of the central point, it's telic, and thus some form of accusative. Since Erkki is an overt nominative subject,

Erkki ostaa auton
Erkki buy-3sg car.gen
Erkki (will) buy a car – the telicity implies that we're talking about him actually completing the transaction.

katselen televisiota
watch-1sg television-part
I am watching television

A further complication resides in the personal pronouns ̣- they all have an accusative form that is more similar to the plural nominative-accusative than to the genitive. Let's compare the noun morphology for nom, gen, acc1, acc2 and plur nom for the pronouns "minä", "sinä" (me, you) and the noun "talo" (house). The plural nom/acc of 1sg and 2sg does not really exist for personal pronouns in Finnish, as the plurals are formed from separate roots.

	nom	gen	"acc 1"	"acc 2"	plur nom/acc
1sg	minä	minun	minut	minut	n/a ("minut")
2sg	sinä	sinun	sinut	sinut	n/a ("sinut")
3pl	he	heidän	heidät	heidät	n/a ("heidät")
talo	talo	talon	talon	talo	talot

However, it turns out that somehow, the minut/sinut/... forms underlyingly are genitives or nominatives- they trigger genitive or nominal adjectival congruence depending on which object form is expected. The pronoun 'who', kuka, which is rich in suppletion (kuka, kene-, ke- being the principal roots) can have both kuka and kenet for "acc2" objects. The congruence with genitive adjectives also "feeds back" and forces the pronoun itself get genitive marking, and congruence with nominative adjectives operates likewise.

More on this stuff can be found in Paul Kiparsky's Structural Case in Finnish, a very thorough treatment of object and subject case in Finnish. 

What we as conlangers can take away from this is the potential for a case with limited distribution to behave weirdly outside of that context: an interesting thing would be to have more lexemes behave like kuka/kene-/ke- as per above. Alternatively, like the minut/sinut/... forms, the congruence could indicate an underlying case distinction.

Another option that I sort of envisioned while reading this was to have the minut/sinut/... gamut be underlyingly genitive throughout the system, and having adjectives marked for the "wrong case forms". By "wrong case forms", I mean as per the decision algorithm given above. So, when that decision algorithm indicates the nominative/acc2 case, but an adjective appears with a pronoun that conflates acc1 and acc2, the adjective appears in the genitive - and maybe even better, have the kuka/kene-/ke- -like thing happen and force the entire phrase into the genitive.

There's probably even more weird things one could come up with.

Bryatesle: Case Usage III: the Dative

This post is part of a series on the case system of Bryatesle

I. The nominative and some subcases

II. Gaps

III. The Dative

IV. The Ablative

V. The Ergative

Besides the nominative and accusative (which later will be described), Bryatelse uses dative and ablative quite prominently. For some combined forms, the dative and ablative are conflated into a single 'oblique'.

The dative is comparable in some sense to a classical dative - it marks the recipient of an action. Examples:

emi mersi nalei
she him.dat sing-3sg - she sings for him

nek es urek siber
me.dat it strange appear.3sgN - it appears strange to me

xnërsi xus lrama
you.pl.dat xus fall-3sgN - something bad happened to you

However, beyond this, it also serves as quirky case subject with a handful of verbs:

tënk bulyr nïsr kevyk du inrahat
who.dat believe.3sg I.^2ndsubj that like behave.1sg? - Who(DAT!) believes that I behave like that?

 The dative further can serve as a genitive:

Erkube tebuxu vybara
Erkub.dat cake.neut.nom suffice.telic3sgN (the verb is vyberet in the atelic form); Erkub's cake sufficed. 

The dative is the case used when the possessor is not marked as subject, secondary subject or object of the clause. Topical secondary subjects can own any participant of the clause, subjects can own any participants, objects can own oblique arguments, and oblique arguments can own other oblique arguments. A dative or ablative that is directly in front of a possessed noun, however, can own that noun. Datives are preferred with human possessors, ablatives with inanimates and non-human animates.

Directions with nouns are not given by the dative, most of the time - generally, those are formed by postpositions with the accusative.

In combination with the secondary cases, the dative further has some interesting deals - with the partitive it and the ablative merge and form a single oblique case. With the definite the implied telicity, pastness, 'realisness', absolutely-likely-to-happen futureness, etc, of the statement is slightly strengthened.

With the partitive, the opposite implication is generally acquired, and there's a very weakened definiteness. (However, as noted, it then merges with the ablative.) The possessive should be fairly well understood by now. The reciprocal object will have its own post sooner or later. The secondary subject appears on the dative for two quite opposite reasons:

Promoted Dative Secondary Subjects

Subordinate Dative Secondary Subjects 

The previous kind basically are causers, parties involved indirectly but who cause things to come about. The subordinate dative secondary subjects are embedded in VPs that are objects of the main verb; they either are quirky case subjects or they are datives that serve a topic-like function in the embedded subclause.

Erkub taidënisr rulmunti ake sigi
Erkub wife-dat-2ndsubj tobacco.obliq-part not drink.atelic-3sg - Erkub doesn't smoke tobacco (because his wife doesn't like it)

Garkeb kendynnyx bumal sega
Garkeb desire.dat-pl.neut.2ndsubj water drink.atelic-3sg.neut
Garkeb felt like drinking water, so he did

The subordinate kind would be exemplified by

Firgyk naskannyx barlei ydrer
Firgyk field.fem-dat-plur.2ndsubj-plur dry_up.atelic-3sg fear-3sg.neut
Firgyk fears the field will dry up

The embedded verb usually comes before the main verb, but if the semantic difference of the kinds of verbs involved is big enough, the order can be reversed, and the change can signal differences along these lines:

Firgyk naskannyx ydrei barlei: Firgyk, on the account of the field is worried - it might dry up.

Firgyk ydrei naskannyx barlei: Firgyk worries, the field may dry up

naskannyx barlei Firgyk ydrei: the field drying up has Firgyk worried.

The remaining forms - both main objects and secondary objects - will be covered in the next post.

Ćwarmin: Some Marginal Cases

I previously mentioned that Ćwarmin has a number of marginal cases. Some case forms fill gaps in the regular case system for a few nouns, others are limited to just a few nouns altogether. Here are three such marginal cases:

1. Postpositional Case

This case exists for:

• Many nouns that refer to locations that designate parts of a town or village or buildings in general (tretke - town, city, badku - village, wundarś - marketplace, open square, winćə - city gates, rumb - temple, wicxə - house, wruŋna - castle, sirni - temporary building
• agricultural locations (acres - karaž, granaries - perəc, barns - birsi, fallow land - saŋmoru, pasture land - grundu)
• waterways (iməl, river; udug lake; žewə a sound or a narrow maritime passage in general, rəige bay, cove)
• the noun 'ćan', table.

Its suffixes are: singular: -(i)ši|-(u)šu, plural: -(i)žwi|-(u)žwu, paucal: -(i)žmi|-(u)žmu

Morphologically, there's a tendence for the forms to be slightly irregular:

ćan - canšu - ćažwu - ćažmu

winćə - winši - wižwi - wižmi 

wicxe - wiči - witwi -  wimi

karaž - karažžu - karažwu - karažmu

iməl - imiši - imižwi - imižmi

grundu - grundu - gružwu - gružmu

birsi - birsi - biržwi - biržmi

tretke - treči - trežwi - trežmi 

udug - urušu - uružwu - uružmu

It is used with most postpositions.

2. By Order|Permission Of
Titles of authority, family members. There's also the word 'har' ("mr", "mrs", "ms") which serves to combine with person names and can carry this morpheme.

singular indefinite: -sada|-sədə plural indefinite: -samu|-səmi

singular definite: -sandan|-sənden plural definite: -samman|-səmmin

Thus, we get forms like 

tergisədə = by order|authority of a clergyman

jehisəmmin = by (long-standing) obligation to or grant by the royal crown

jehisənden = by order or obligation from the ruling king

Even though notionally definite, har takes the indefinite forms when combined with a name

Geres hasada - by order of (mister) Geres

tretkitite hasamman = by permission|order from the town's men

3.  'Along'
The postposition 'along' - šimšim - has merged with a few nouns.

iməl, river: singular: imitčimš plural: imiwšimš

runa,  road: singular runšumš , plural: runawšumš

wundarś, marketplace: wundruśšumš (more generally 'in the market'), no plural

grundu, pasture - grunšumš:  following a herd on a foraging trip

Revisiting Bryatesle: Phonology and nouns

I have now postponed updating Bryatesle for almost a decade. Since it was (and still is) a language with some potential greatness, I will now go on developing it on this blog. But first, an overview.

Phonology

Bryatesle basically has these vowels, all showcasing length distinction:

i  ɨ   u

ɛ   

     ɑ

The following consonant phonemes are present:

p b ɸ ʋ m t̪ d̪ s̪ z̪ l̪ n̪ t̙ʲ d̙ʲ rʲ̙ ɕ lʲ̙ n̙ʲ k g x 

Orthographically, these are represented as p b f w m t d s z l n ţ ḑ ŗ ş ļ ņ k g h. Some morphophonological alterations happen between some of them - especially, short words tend to avoid having two dental or two postalveolar consonants of the same kind of articulation close together.

For the moment, allophony will not be presented in any greater detail, nor will phonotax.

Grammar

The Noun

The noun, like in Indo-European languages come in three genders - masculine, feminine and neuter. This is fairly boring, but opens some fairly intriguing possibilities. Bryatesle's case system consists of two partially parallel systems. For lack of a better terminology, I have decided to call these primary and secondary cases.

Primary Cases

The six primary cases line up in a kind of two-by-three system: nominative vs. accusative, dative vs. ablative, vocative vs. exclamative. 

The nominative and accusative distinguish subjects from objects. Nominal complements of verbs also agree with the subject or object noun that they pertain too. Neuter nouns do not distinguish nominative from accusative; however, neuter subjects of transitive verbs take a masculine nominative determiner, essentially forming a kind of periphrastic ergative.

The dative and ablative both figure in ways quite typical of Indo-European languages; 

The vocative and exclamative form a pair of opposites. The vocative is used to attract the attention of someone - usually a person - to the listener, the exclamative on the other hand draws the attention of the listeners to a person or a thing. These are not all the uses of them - they also have uses that verge onto information structure, pragmatics and social interaction.

Secondary Cases

The secondary cases come in a much more haphazard bunch. Some agglutinate, some are more fusional. The full list consists of possessed, definite, partitive, the reciprocal object, the secondary subject, negativity agreement and suggestion marking. The possessed secondary case marks nouns that are the property of, or otherwise in some significant relation to another noun, usually some salient argument in the phrase or a nearby noun in the dative. The exact uses of the partitive will require a post of its own, as will the reciprocal objects and secondary subjects. Suggestion marking is often used with the exclamative, but also with some other cases. Its main role is to communicate that the statement is a suggestion. The definite case is fairly similar to English 'the', but with more syntactic restrictions.

Number

Bryatesle has singular and plural numbers, and to a small extent an undefined number. This final number is highly restricted in usage - mainly appearing in compounds. The undefined number distinguishes two cases, nominative and non-nominative.

Morphological tables will appear at some point.

Short Sketch #5: Definiteness marking and definiteness types

Definiteness is a thing some languages do not grammaticalize to the extent English does, and on the other hand, some languages have it even more grammaticalized - see, e.g. how it influences both adjective and noun inflection in Swedish, how it affects verbs in Hungarian, and so on.

Let us try out a slightly more complex thing. Some languages have three levels of definiteness, e.g. known to listener, known to speaker, and indefinite. 

Example, based on sample sentences from some pidgin, I don't recall the source where I saw these:

1. I am looking for a car → any car will do.
2. I am looking for one car → there is a specific car, but the listener is not expected to know which.
3. I am looking for the car → the listener too knows which car you are looking for.

(Also notice how "this" is acquiring a similar usage in colloquial English, c.f. any google result for "so this girl|dude|chick|guy|... walks|says|..." This is clearly not a deictic use of this, but rather a pragmatic use where it marks 'there is a specific girl that did it, but you probably don't know who she is, but I might refer to her in the future so she's significant enough for the narrative.)

Now, it seems rather natural to me that different constituents of a sentence will be differently likely to be marked for different types of definiteness, and this could easily lead to different kinds of arguments having very different marking strategies as well as a different number of distinctions.

An obvious example are languages where the object can be marked for definiteness by differential object marking, but other constituents have nothing of the sort. Usually, there is good likelihood that the subject is definite - even more so for the topic, but as topics and subjects often coincide, well, there you go.

A draft of this kind of a system would be something like:

• definite non-subject (2 or 3) topics trigger extra auxiliary verb that only carries congruence and has no semantic content

• definite subjects (2 or 3) trigger congruence in the verb (alternatively, see short sketch #1 for another strategy that could be used here)

• definite objects (3) trigger congruence in the verb and accusative case
• definite objects (2) trigger accusative case
• indefinite objects (1) take neither

• other definite (3) non-topic nouns trigger congruence on adpositions
• other non-topic nouns (that is, (2 or 1) functioning by virtue of case marking as an argument of the verb) do not trigger any congruence strategies
• different definiteness correlates with different case systems, something along these lines:
• 3:     nom - acc - dat - lat - abl - part - gen - instr
• 2:     nom - acc - dat        - abl          - gen
• 1:     nom                  - lat -         abl
• All topics, however, no matter definiteness, use the full (3) case system
• The lative for indefinitive nouns is identical in form to the dative for definite (2/3) nouns.

Other parameters could affect different systems: maybe animates have a different number of levels of definiteness from inanimates or whatever, ... however, something along these lines seems fairly intricate and interesting imho.

Detail #20: Complements and implicit case

A hierarchy-like thing where nouns, when operating as complements assume implicit case, so e.g.

I am town = I am in town

He becomes town = He goes to town 

This would probably interact with nouns and verbs in various complicated ways, and could possibly fit well with an isolating language, so I may include it in the isolating language I am planning. This differs from topic-comment in some ways, which I should probably explain in greater detail but this'll be enough for tonight.

Notice that this should only go for complements, and not for adverbs, in the language in question.

Detail #3: some analytical tense constructions

In some language where the normal indicative present (progressive) is the simplest tense, morphologically, the active participle is used with copula and whatever verb construction is used in place of to have, to obtain  various TAMs by various constructions. To be is used with intransitive verbs, to have with transitive ones.

subj: nom, (obj: acc),  participle.acc = inchoative
subj: comitative, (obj: acc),  participle.nom = habitual [exceptional in using to be even when an object is present]
subj: dat, obj: instr, participle.nom = indicates that the subject would like to do something. Intransitives require a dummy object, which normally is the numeral "one" or an indefinite pronoun.
subj. dat, (obj: nom or acc), is + participle(comitative) = obligation

The piece of paper on which I wrote this idea down years ago was tiny, and therefore there's a lot of really short ad hoc abbreviations in it. Hence, exactly what I meant is a bit unclear to me.

Still, I think a language with something like this would be best with, say, 4-5 different constructions along these lines, maybe one or two of which only appear with objects present. Finally, they shouldn't completely cover a certain type of thing - like each construction encoding a particular tense or a particular aspect or a particular mood; they should each express some combination of tenses, aspects and moods, and not necessarily even just one of them; and preferrably, they would be somewhat orthogonal to each other in what they express, so that they not form a neat paradigm.

Not every combination of subj.[case1], obj[case2], participle[case3] should be used, and some constructions where two of them have the same case could very well be permitted.