Case Survey

[Micamo]

Oh, nominal modality I understand (and even implement in a couple of langs). What I meant was clausal modality being attached to nouns and taking up a slot in the case paradigm.

Let's take for example: "Dig!" Where does the imperative marker go?

[eldin raigmore]

Oh, nominal modality I understand (and even implement in a couple of langs). What I meant was clausal modality being attached to nouns and taking up a slot in the case paradigm.

Let's take for example: "Dig!" Where does the imperative marker go?

On a related topic, who's that in your avatar?

[Micamo]

Tomoe Mami from Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, a fanart piece of her. I don't watch the series, I just thought it was a beautifully drawn piece.

[SydneyFreedberg]

8) Genitive cases: possessive (strong), possessed (weak)
Simple: Possessive case marks a noun which possess another noun in the sentence, possessed marks a noun which is itself possessed.

Is the "possessed case" similar to the status constructus in Semitic languages?

Maybe? I think so, based on Googling "status constructus" a few minutes ago and reading the Wikipedia article, which is not exactly a high standard of knowledge.

But maybe not quite.

The example I'd give -- again, trying to think in the conculture's terms, which are all about hierarchy -- is that if you say "the soldier's regiment," you put "soldier" in the POSSESSED case: the soldier belongs to the regiment. But if you say "the colonel's regiment," you put "colonel" in the POSSESSIVE: the regiment belongs to the colonel. (A colonel being the traditional rank of a regimental commander, for those of you not as fascinated as I am by military history).

[SydneyFreedberg]

Modality marking on nouns? How does that work?.... nominal modality I understand (and even implement in a couple of langs). What I meant was clausal modality being attached to nouns and taking up a slot in the case paradigm.

You’re probably confused because I’ve been unclear, rather than because I’ve come up with something brilliantly innovative. But learning I’ve been unclear is a valuable experience for me, if not for anyone else!

I shouldn't have merely said the conculture's grammarians don't distinguish between cases and moods: They don't particularly distinguish between NOUNS and VERBS. Inflect the root one way and you get an emphatic verb (=indicative with strong evidentiality); "weaken" that emphatic form and you get the tentative (=indicative with weak evidentiality); but inflect the root another way altogether, and it becomes a nominative noun. I understand tri-consonantal roots in Arabic work somewhat like this (based only on reading Richard A. Morneau, “Arabic Morphology in Artificial Languages,” ca. 1994, at http://www.eskimo.com/~ram/arabic_morphology.html).

(N.b. this is doable without creating too much confusion because there's not much (or any) agreement between words, e.g. an adjective modifying a conditional verb doesn't go into the conditional mood, it stays in the stative case.)

I'll give a very tentative and partial example, largely because I haven't cleared this inflection pattern with my wife yet! (She’s in the next room reading Hunger Games, which by the way is an awesome novel).

Root concept: adjayn (IPA adʒeɪn, I think) = to know, knowledge, knowledgeable

Imperative mood (the unmarked or dictionary form): adjayn! = [you must] know! = (more idiomatically) learn it!
Implorative mood (derived by weakening imperative): adjaam = please know = please learn it

Nominative case: adjaan = knowledge (as the subject of a verb)
Accusative case: adjaam = knowledge (as the object of a verb)

Instrumental case: adjaant = by means of knowledge = knowledgeably
Comitative case: adjamet = with knowledge = knowledgeably (the distinction’s lost in English)

Stative case: adjaan = [to be] knowledgeable (remember, there’s no verb or periphrasis for “to be,” so effectively “to be” can be read as implied in every adjective).
Locative case: adjam = [to be] in knowledge = to be knowledge (wait, what?). The only actual use of such a construction that occurs to me is, if you were to say the (rather strange) sentence “power is knowledge,” the English phrase “is knowledge” would be translated by “adjam.”

Clear as mud?

Note that all these particular inflections of the root may move to different cases/moods or be replaced by something else more euphonious after I consult with my wife, who graduates with her MFA in poetry this Friday and is rather better at the aesthetics of sound than I am.

By the way, is this way of inflecting a root considered "fusional"? I'm pretty sure it's not agglutinative or synthetic.

[Micamo]

Oh, I think I get it. There's no lexical distinction between nouns and verbs, and any root can be used in either "noun mode" or "verb mode." The verbal affixes are only used in verb mode and the nominal affixes are only used in noun mode. The confusion of case and mood is because they both happen to take the same "slot".

(I do much the same thing in one language but to a greater extent. Midhera morphology... shares a bit more between nouns and verbs. For example, the pluractionality affixes on verbs are identical to the number affixes on nouns.)

I suppose the next question is: Generally, what's the difference between a noun form and an otherwise identical verb form? What would be the meaning of "tree" as a verb, for instance? And the reverse? What does "run" mean as a noun?

As for fusionality... I'd say so. There's clearly some sort of vowel affection going on here.

[Micamo]

The example I'd give -- again, trying to think in the conculture's terms, which are all about hierarchy -- is that if you say "the soldier's regiment," you put "soldier" in the POSSESSED case: the soldier belongs to the regiment. But if you say "the colonel's regiment," you put "colonel" in the POSSESSIVE: the regiment belongs to the colonel. (A colonel being the traditional rank of a regimental commander, for those of you not as fascinated as I am by military history).

"Possessed" is usually used to describe the marker used in head-marking genitive constructions, basically stuff like "The tail-POSSESSED dog." What you're describing here is what we call Possessive Classification, having different markers for different genitival relationships. Generally the split is some kind of alienable vs. inalienable possession distinction (my skull that's inside my head vs. my skull in my bone collection), but here it appears you have Possession vs. Association (My school that I own and run vs. my school that I go to every day).

[Xing]

8) Genitive cases: possessive (strong), possessed (weak)
Simple: Possessive case marks a noun which possess another noun in the sentence, possessed marks a noun which is itself possessed.

Is the "possessed case" similar to the status constructus in Semitic languages?

Maybe? I think so, based on Googling "status constructus" a few minutes ago and reading the Wikipedia article, which is not exactly a high standard of knowledge.

But maybe not quite.

The example I'd give -- again, trying to think in the conculture's terms, which are all about hierarchy -- is that if you say "the soldier's regiment," you put "soldier" in the POSSESSED case: the soldier belongs to the regiment. But if you say "the colonel's regiment," you put "colonel" in the POSSESSIVE: the regiment belongs to the colonel. (A colonel being the traditional rank of a regimental commander, for those of you not as fascinated as I am by military history).

The construct state in Semitic languages means, that in a possessive/genitivt phrase, you mark the possessed/owned, rather than the possessor/owner.

Suppose you want to refer to a dog, owned by a man. With a traditional genitive case, you would say something like "Man-GEN dog" (or Dog Man-Gen, depending on the word order in the language). In plain English, "the man's dog". The possessor/owner is the marked one. In a languages with a constrict state, you would say something like "Dog-CONSTR man" (or "Man dog-CONSTR), the marked one is the owned/possessed.

Technically, the construct state is not a form of case-marking (or seems at least that it would be non-standard terminology to refer to it as a case). Case-marking is a form of dependent-marking, while the construct state is a form of head-marking.

There are of course situations where you may want to treat the owner as the head of the clause, and the owned as a dependent. Suppose you want to refer to the man, rather than the dog. You could say something like "the man with the dog". "Dog" is here a dependent of man, it's not what is primarily referred to, but a kind of characterisation of the man. In English we use a preposition (with), but in some languages there's a specialised case for this (sometimes called proprietive or concomitant case)

What you have, though, looks like a kind of possessive classification, where one uses different forms of genitive/possessive constructions, depending on the relationship between the owner/possessor and the owned/possessesed. Many languages have this. I think it's nice :)

[SydneyFreedberg]

1. The Possessive/Possessed cases

What you're describing here is what we call Possessive Classification, having different markers for different genitival relationships. Generally the split is some kind of alienable vs. inalienable possession distinction (my skull that's inside my head vs. my skull in my bone collection), but here it appears you have Possession vs. Association (My school that I own and run vs. my school that I go to every day).

Yes, that's it -- except it's not just "association," it's specifically and rather intensely "belonging to."

What you have, though, looks like a kind of possessive classification, where one uses different forms of genitive/possessive constructions, depending on the relationship between the owner/possessor and the owned/possessesed. Many languages have this. I think it's nice :)

Me too. Specifically, my wife & I like the way it forces you to make hierarchical distinctions just trying to get out everyday sentences.

So what's the proper terminology to distinguish these two forms of "possessive classification?"


2. I think that I shall never see / a verb as lovely as a tree

Generally, what's the difference between a noun form and an otherwise identical verb form? What would be the meaning of "tree" as a verb, for instance? And the reverse? What does "run" mean as a noun?

"Tree" as a verb? How about "to stand tall." E.g. tree.IMPERATIVE = "stand tall!"
I actually hadn't thought about this aspect of the language before, but now that you have me thinking about it, it should be a lot of fun figuring out cool meanings for a given root when inflected into a part of speech that it wouldn't be able to take on in English. I suspect they'd end up either being metaphors or other ways of expressing the same root concept. I don't know yet whether "to tree" means "stand tall" because it's a metaphor (stand tall like a tree) or because the original meaning of "tree" is "thing which stands up tall."

"Run" as a noun is much simpler: it's either the act of running or a distance run or possibly either according to context, as with the English sentences "I went for my morning run" and "a marathon is a 26-mile run."

(Again, all that's off the top of my head, given that the lexicon is still miniscule).


3. Fusionality vs. isolation

Oh, I think I get it. There's no lexical distinction between nouns and verbs, and any root can be used in either "noun mode" or "verb mode." The verbal affixes are only used in verb mode and the nominal affixes are only used in noun mode. The confusion of case and mood is because they both happen to take the same "slot". (I do much the same thing in one language but to a greater extent. Midhera morphology... shares a bit more between nouns and verbs. For example, the pluractionality affixes on verbs are identical to the number affixes on nouns.).... As for fusionality... I'd say so. There's clearly some sort of vowel affection going on here.

"Vowel affection"? That's a rather charming image -- I think of an "a" and an "e" snuggling up with a little heart over them. I presume it has a more technical meaning, though.

One reason I'm not sure about whether this language is all that fusional: Each ending (they're not quite affixes) corresponds neatly to one case/mood/whatever. There's not one ending that fuses multiple grammatical elements to mark a word as, say, a verb in the feminine plural past. That's because words don't inflect to reflext pluralization at all, in fact (in contast your Midhera conlang), or gender, or tense. Tense in particular is handled by putting a "place in time" in the locative case - "in yesterday I stab a hobo" -- and number is likewise indicated by just throwing another word in there -- "in yesterday I stab five hobo" -- all of which sounds isolating to me.

[Micamo]

Yes, that's it -- except it's not just "association," it's specifically and rather intensely "belonging to."

Me too. Specifically, my wife & I like the way it forces you to make hierarchical distinctions just trying to get out everyday sentences.

So what's the proper terminology to distinguish these two forms of "possessive classification?"

I don't think I've ever seen a natural language that uses this exact system. So there probably isn't a standard terminology for these particular possessive classes; you can get away with making up your own terms. I would, however, avoid using the "possessed" name you already have as this does have a standard (and very different) usage already.

"Tree" as a verb? How about "to stand tall." E.g. tree.IMPERATIVE = "stand tall!"
I actually hadn't thought about this aspect of the language before, but now that you have me thinking about it, it should be a lot of fun figuring out cool meanings for a given root when inflected into a part of speech that it wouldn't be able to take on in English. I suspect they'd end up either being metaphors or other ways of expressing the same root concept. I don't know yet whether "to tree" means "stand tall" because it's a metaphor (stand tall like a tree) or because the original meaning of "tree" is "thing which stands up tall."

One has to wonder why it doesn't simply have the meaning of a stative verb; "Be a tree."

"Vowel affection"? That's a rather charming image -- I think of an "a" and an "e" snuggling up with a little heart over them. I presume it has a more technical meaning, though.

D'aaaawww <3

Take three given forms you cite as an example:

adjayn
adjaam
adjamet

The second vowel changes according to (is "affected" by) the suffix.

One reason I'm not sure about whether this language is all that fusional: Each ending (they're not quite affixes) corresponds neatly to one case/mood/whatever. There's not one ending that fuses multiple grammatical elements to mark a word as, say, a verb in the feminine plural past. That's because words don't inflect to reflext pluralization at all, in fact (in contast your Midhera conlang), or gender, or tense. Tense in particular is handled by putting a "place in time" in the locative case - "in yesterday I stab a hobo" -- and number is likewise indicated by just throwing another word in there -- "in yesterday I stab five hobo" -- all of which sounds isolating to me.

Oh, no no no. "Fusion" is a phonological phenomenon where the phonetic content of one morpheme affects the phonetic content of another. What you're talking about, when a single morpheme encodes for multiple inflectional categories, is called Polyexponence. Though fusion is often a cause of polyexponence (where two formerly separate affix slots become mingled together such as to make it silly to call them separate) but you can have one without the other; Take for example English's past tense suffix "-d". Depending on what it attaches to, it can be realized as:

/t/, after a voiceless consonant.
/d/, after a voiced consonant or vowel.
/əd/, after /t/ or /d/.

This is fusion but not polyexponence; The -d by itself entails nothing other than the past tense.

[Xing]

Wikipædia has a page for "possessed case". It doesn't name any languages with this case. The only reference is a work on Cariban grammar.

[SydneyFreedberg]

{many helpful things}

Thank you!

One has to wonder why it doesn't simply have the meaning of a stative verb; "Be a tree."

Because that seems depressingly logical?

Out of sheer perversity, when you say Noun A equals Noun B, Noun B has to go in the LOCATIVE. So "I am a man" would literally be "I am in a man," which of course could cause all sorts of misunderstandings. A less confusing but clunkier literal translation would be "I am in the category of 'men." (Remember that words don't inflect to show singular vs. plural).

Therefore "it is in a tree" could either mean "that thing, it's physically located in a tree" or "that thing, over there, it belongs to the category of 'trees.'" Presumably the meaning would be clear from context except in especially amusing situations.

[Micamo]

Thank you!

You're welcome! :D

If you ever have any questions, feel free to ask. I love being helpful.

Because that seems depressingly logical?

I say so because of the main problem I encounter in my own implementation: Universality.

Lets say your speakers come into contact with a foreign object they've never seen before, that the foreigners call a "Wigglewaggle." Your speakers can loan in "wigglewaggle" (or an appropriately phonetically modified form) just fine, but what does its verb interpretation mean? If the transformations between nouns and verbs is not semantically transparent, or does not at least have a default semantically transparent form, you'll run into problems whenever something new is coined on either side of the divide.

[SydneyFreedberg]

Lets say your speakers come into contact with a foreign object they've never seen before, that the foreigners call a "Wigglewaggle." Your speakers can loan in "wigglewaggle" (or an appropriately phonetically modified form) just fine, but what does its verb interpretation mean? If the transformations between nouns and verbs is not semantically transparent, or does not at least have a default semantically transparent form, you'll run into problems whenever something new is coined on either side of the divide.

Problems are fun! The language is meant to have evolved in a fashion reminiscent of English, with its speakers variously being conquered or conquering others sufficiently often that there are massive numbers of loan words, each horrifically mispronounced and grammatically mangled in its own lovely way.

Now, ask me that question again after we've been trying to work on the lexicon for a while....

[Micamo]

Now, ask me that question again after we've been trying to work on the lexicon for a while....

Lol. Will do ;P

(An easy but boring way to solve this problem without transparent semantics is to simply analyze it as a large number of identical lexical entries for nouns and verbs and make no requirement the identical entries having related meanings.)

[SydneyFreedberg]

Also, your avatar picture is indeed startlingly pretty. Hooray for anime fan-art lifted off the internet.

[taylorS]

Alpic has 6 cases: Agentive, Patientive, Genitive, Dative, Instrumental, and Topical. Only pronouns distinguish Agentive and Patientive in the modern language. It is an Active-Stative language and hence the subject of an intransitive sentence can be either Agentive or Patientive depending on the intended meaning

The nominal paradigms of the pronouns mu "I", du "you", vu "we", and the noun pora "fire"

Agentive: mu
Patientive: mi
Genitive: mwe
Dative: mim
Instrumental: mit
Topical: mugo

Agentive: du
Patientive: di
Genitive: dwe
Dative: dim
Instrumental: dit
Topical: dugo

Agentive: vu
Patientive: vi
Genitive: ve
Dative: vir
Instrumental: vit
Topical: vugot

Direct Singular: da pora "the fire"
Direct Plural: dat porat "the fires"
Genitive Singular: das poras "of the fire"
Genitive Plural: dasa porasa "of the fires"
Dative Singular: dan poran "to/for the fire"
Dative Plural: dar porar "to/for the fires"
Instrumental Singular: dat porat "with the fire"
Instrumental Plural: data porata 'with the fires"
Topical Singular: poraf "Oh, the fire..."
Topical Plural: poravut "Oh, the fires..."

The difference between agentive and patientive subjects is also marked on the verb. The personal inflection takes the Dynamic form if the subject is the Agent and it takes the Stative form if the subject is the Patient

kalkat "you kill"
kalkak "you die"

[Micamo]

How's the topical case used? What if the topic's the same as, say, the agent?

[Xing]

How's the topical case used? What if the topic's the same as, say, the agent?

I guess it's similar to Japanese wa vs ga.

Or...?

[eldin raigmore]

How's the topical case used? What if the topic's the same as, say, the agent?

I guess it's similar to Japanese wa vs ga.

Or...?

Or maybe Tagalog's "ang".

The focused definite participant in Tagalog is marked with the preposition/article "ang", and the voice of the verb shows what semantic role the "ang"-marked entity plays; agent or whatever.