head-only case marking in NPs?

[Siva Kalyan]

Yes, you could:

inta.k kuẓantai-kku mātram pariṭcai iru-kkum
this child-DAT only exam exist-FUT.NEUT
“Only this child will have an exam”

There’s only a handful of modifiers that can go after the head noun, though—mostly they come before the head (demonstratives, genitives, adjectives, numerals, relative clauses and participles).

Also, the modifier cannot go anywhere else without changing the meaning: putting mātram after pariṭcai would make it “This child will have only an exam”. (Likewise with ellām.) Putting it anywhere else would be ungrammatical. Thus, I don’t think it’s a floating quantifier.

I hope this makes things clearer.
Siva

--  
Siva Kalyan
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On Tuesday, 26 July 2011 at 2:10 PM, Sebastian Nordhoff wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:30:27 +0200, Siva Kalyan  
> <sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com (mailto:sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com)> wrote:
>  
> > Tamil does this:
> >  
> > inta.k kuẓantai-kaḷ-ukk ellām pariṭcai iru-kkāt=ā?
> > [PROX.DEM child-PL-DAT all]NP exam(.NOM) exist-FUT.NEG.NEUT=Q
> > “Won’t all these children have an exam?” (example from  
> > www.writermugil.com/?p=1036 (http://www.writermugil.com/?p=1036))
>  
> one would have to make sure of course that ellām is not a floating  
> quantifier here. Could you use another modifier in this position?
> Best
> Sebastian
>  
>  
> >  
> > Siva
> >  
> > --
> > Siva Kalyan
> > Sent with Sparrow (http://bit.ly/sigsprw)
> >  
> > On Sunday, 24 July 2011 at 9:45 AM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:
> >  
> > > Dear typologists,
> > >  
> > > I am looking for unequivocal examples of one of the classes of Dench &  
> > > Evans' (1988) typology of case marker distribution over constituents of  
> > > an NP, viz. for "head marking". Examples I need (if they exist at all)  
> > > are of the following kind: (i) the case marker can attach to the head  
> > > noun of the NP only, and not to any of its modifiers, and (ii) the  
> > > position of the head can be NP-internal, i.e. neither NP-initial nor  
> > > NP-final. In other words, I need examples adhering to the following  
> > > scheme:
> > >  
> > > [ Mod N-case Mod] NP
> > >  
> > > The Uradhi example provided by Dench & Evans (1988: 5) is not  
> > > unequivocal, since there the noun is NP-initial, so this could well be  
> > > an instance of well-documented second-position (Wackernagel)  
> > > case-marking.
> > >  
> > > Thank you in advance!
> > >  
> > > Best wishes,
> > >  
> > > Peter
> > >  
> > > --
> > > Peter Arkadiev, PhD
> > > Institute of Slavic Studies
> > > Russian Academy of Sciences
> > > Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119334 Moscow
> > > peterarkadiev at yandex.ru (mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru) (mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru)
> > > http://www.inslav.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=279
>  
>  
> --  
> Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

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