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Dear all, let me briefly comment upon three postings, one of them on
the sister mailing list Funknet [Östen]<br>
:<br>
(a) Dear Östen,
<br>
many thanks for this nice example. One additional question: Doesn't
the Russian phrase you quote represent an appositional chain [each of
the terms kolleg, nashij, and Andrej Shevchenko have strong referential
properties]?
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">In Russian, prepositions can be doubled in a
way that looks like incipient
<br>
case agreement. This shows up above all in genres like folklore, but
here is
<br>
a beautiful example I just found on the Internet:
<br>
<br>
"...u kollegi u nashego u Andreja Shevchenko byla klassnaja citata..."
<br>
at colleague.GEN at our.GEN at Andrej.GEN Shevchenko.GEN be.PRET.F.SG
<br>
first-class quotation
<br>
'our colleague A.S. had a first-class quotation'
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
(b) Dear Marcel,
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">A question: Relational nouns (or auxiliary
nouns, as I have called them), which inflect for person plus case
and/or are themselves governed by adpositions, assume relational
functions similar to case and adpositions in (among others) Turkic and
Semitic languages. Which of the terms discussed are intended to cover
them?<br>
</blockquote>
*If* I understand you correctly, you refer to constuctions like the
following Tyvan example:
<br>
<br>
ot üstü-n-den
<br>
fire top-*3SG:POSS-ABL
<br>
'from the top of the fire'
<br>
<br>
I have glossed -n- as *3SG:POSS just because it merely is a diachronic
interpretation (hope that I have got this right!). According to my
approach, I would interpret ot üstü-n- in terms of an appositional
structure [unspecific possessive construction or so, if you like] (fire
*its=top), which is then case-marked by ABL -den. The marker -den (the
relational echo) would be motivated by the appropriate verb (e.g.
'[ashes] [fell from] [top of the fire]'.
<br>
<br>
(c) Dear Claude,
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"> I coin FUNCTEME in the following way: the
suffix -eme, in the terminology of linguistics as well as in that of
other sciences, regularly refers to "a unit (often the smallest one) of
what the root says" (cf. phoneme, toneme, sememe, etc.). The root, in
funct-eme, says that the unit in question merely indicates the function
of the element (mostly a noun or noun phrase) that it governs: Engl.
for in for my friend indicates that my friend is the benefactive
complement of the predicate. It is obvious that prepositions like for
also have a meaning (and this is the main reason why case was
originally used by Fillmore 1968 in a semantic acception), but functeme
strictly refers to the syntactic role of relators. Thus, functeme
precisely says what relators are actually from the morphological and
syntactic point(s) of view: they are units of function marking.<br>
</blockquote>
You say: "The 'unit (...) indicates the function of the element (...)
that it governs". Admittedly, I have some problems in understanding
this phrase: Maybe that e.g. prepostions govern their NP/nouns
(personally, I do not think so, rather, I believe that it is the
cluster {verb+preposition} that governs the NP/noun). But let's take an
example with case marking: amic-us flor-em videt 'The friend sees the
flower'. Can we really say, that -us *itself* 'governs' the referent
'friend', and -em the referent 'flower'? Isn't it the verb videt that
governs the distribution of case markers (> relational echos, in my
terms)? Or did I get you wrong?
<br>
<br>
Best wishes,
<br>
Wolfgang <br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
Institut fuer Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
D-80539 Muenchen
Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180-2486 (Sekr.)
Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180-5343 (Office)
Fax : ++49-(0)89-2180-5345
E-mail: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:W.Schulze@lrz.uni-muenchen.de">W.Schulze@lrz.uni-muenchen.de</a>
Web: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ats.lmu.de./index.php">http://www.ats.lmu.de./index.php</a></pre>
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