Misdirected posting

[Östen Dahl]

Hm, it seems that I sent the posting below to the wrong list. But I guess
many of you read both so it's perhaps no big deal.

Wolfgang asks: "Doesn't the Russian phrase you quote represent an
appositional chain [each of the terms kolleg, nashij, and Andrej Shevchenko
have strong referential properties]?"

Well, I must admit that I don't have native intuitions here. I would guess
that there is indeed more emphasis on each of the constituents here, but on
the other hand, if this becomes more or less the standard construction, as I
think it is in some kinds of folk poetry, the emphasis will disappear. Cf.
the following examples (not exactly folk poetry):

Poka na nashem na sajte ochen' malen'kij arxiv igr...
So_far on our.M.DAT.SG on site very small archive game.GEN.PL
'So far we have a very small game archive on our site'

Chto-to v moem v gorle zastrjalo...
Something in my.M.LOC.SG in throat.LOC.SG stick.PST.N.SG
'Something stuck in my throat'

I don't think these are really appositional chains.

östen


In Russian, prepositions can be doubled in a way that looks like incipient
case agreement. This shows up above all in genres like folklore, but here is
a beautiful example I just found on the Internet:

"...u kollegi u nashego u Andreja Shevchenko byla klassnaja citata..."
at colleague.GEN at our.GEN at Andrej.GEN Shevchenko.GEN be.PRET.F.SG
first-class quotation
'our colleague A.S. had a first-class quotation'

- Östen Dahl





> -----Original Message-----
> From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG]
> On Behalf Of nigel Vincent
> Sent: den 13 juli 2006 16:07
> To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Subject: Re: "flag" for case/adposition
> 
> Just a quick query re Martin's endorsement of Zwicky's observation that
>   "Everything you can do with adpositions you can do with case
> inflections, and vice versa." Might suffixaufnahme or case agreement be
> an instance of something you can do with case but not with an
> adposition? What too about case attraction (arguably a kind of case
> agreement - cf a paper by Hans Vogt many years ago)?
> Nigel