Case syncretisms?

[Randy J. LaPolla]

I'm a bit late with this, but I'd like to mention, in follow-up to the
discussion of case syncretisms, that I did a study of the patterns of
isomorphy of case marking in 145 Tibeto-Burman languages and found that
there were basically three common patterns,
ablative/instrumental/adverbial/agentive/causal clause marker,
comitative/instrumental, and
locative/dative(antiergative)/patient/purposive or conditional clause
marker, and argued, using the concepts of markedness and prototypes,
among others, that the developments should have been along the following
clines: ablative > instrumental > manner adverbial > agentive > anterior
or causal clause subordinator; comitative > instrumental; locative >
dative > patient > purposive, temporal, or conditional clausal
subordinator.

LaPolla, Randy J. 1995. On the Utility of the Concepts of Markedness and
Prototypes in Understanding the Development of Morphological Systems.
Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology  66.4:1149-1185.

--
Randy J. LaPolla
Associate Professor
CTL, City University of Hong Kong
Tat Chee Ave., Kowloon
HONG KONG

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