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<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Dear all,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> The views expressed by Christian, Bill,
Wolfgang and Paolo are interesting, with respect to this
issue.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3>I think
neither<EM> adposition </EM>nor<EM> case </EM>are good
terms:</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT
size=3><EM> </EM>1)<EM>
adposition </EM>only refers to the (admittedly most widespread) situation in
which the syntacic relationship is marked by a morpheme which is located before
(<EM>pre</EM>-) or after (<EM>postposition</EM>) (or on both sides of?
(<EM>circumposition</EM>) ) its complement. Thus <EM>adposition</EM> does not
take into account the tonal and stress strategies also
available.</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial
size=2> <FONT
size=3>2) <EM>case </EM>has become very frequent in linguistic research since
Fillmore's 1968 article "The case for case". But there are drawbacks to its use.
Although it originally had a morphological acception, having, for Latin and
Greek grammarians of the past, like its Greek equivalent <EM>ptôsis</EM>, the
meaning "fall", i.e.deviation from the nominative (then considered to
be the base form), it has come to refer to the semantic aspect of the
phenomenon: we say that in English the benefactive case is marked by the
preposition <EM>for.</EM></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> Moreover, the term <EM>case</EM>,
precisely because it is inherited from the classical tradition<EM>,</EM> implies
that we are referring to inflectional languages, in which there are noun
<EM>declensions</EM> in the strict sense of this term. It should be kept in mind
that a postposition, for example, is not exactly the same phenomenon as a
declension case, if only because, generally, it does not affect, or does
not affect in the same way, the form of the noun to which it is
applied.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3>I</FONT> <FONT
size=3>would therefore</FONT> <FONT size=3>suggest to use the term
<EM>relator</EM>, which refers to the syntactic relationship in itself, and may
be applied to any language, from those which, like Palawan, have only one
relator to those which, like Udmurt or Tabassaran, have between 15 and
25.</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Best, Claude.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>