How Can We Tell What Roles Nouns Play? Case Theory

[@sebastianomuddolon1617]

Last year I took an exam about general syntax and I can confirm the explanations are just perfect!

[@rhubarb4601]

I miss your entertaining and informative talks. PLEASE start doing them again. From Basque Country Spain.

[@frankharr9466]

Here are the things that interest me. 1. Where does genetive case fit in? I would think of it rather like vocative, only more-often used, but there are German verbs that require a genitive verb (although this feature seems to be on the way out) and Russian negated verbs used the genitive for the direct object. 2. There has to be a more rigorous distinction between the indirect object theta role and the beneficiaty information carries out by (for example) words like "to" and "for". For example, the two sentences, "Give Michael the book" and "Give the book to Michael". 3. I've never gotten a satisfactory answer for how theta roles interact with the fact that in Russian certain numbers of things for the noun to take certain cases. I'd like to understand that. And yes, I know about 1-5, but what I don't know is what if that noun phrase is the object of a sentence? What if would otherwise be instrumental? Or genitive? How does Russian preserve that information? I think that's it. I may think of more.

[@johannesm536]

About Hungarian's 18 cases, I actually read a paper recently which argued that Hungarian cases are not actual cases but 'fused postpositions': _"The simple answer to the question, then, is that Hungarian nouns don’t have a true case system. Rather, nouns bear inflectional markers which have the functions of adpositions in other languages, and which differ from the true postpositions of Hungarian only in relatively low-level morphological properties (and even then show fewer clear-cut differences than the cases/postpositions of many languages of a similar type). The cases, in other words, are better thought of as ‘fused postpositions’, a kind of regular portmanteau, akin to the portmanteau definite prepositional forms of German and Romance, such as German zum = zu dem 'to the’ or French du = de le ‘of the’."_

[@Pyovali]

Johannes M How about Finnish? Just adding a clitic won't do.

[@streetsandlanes]

Thanks so much! Very informative!

[@thelingspace]

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you liked it. ^_^

[@facundomadariaga2957]

Talking about fits... where did you get that shirt?! I happen to be from that soccer team's city. Anyway, love the channel. Keep it up!

[@xopowo1979]

hello! Can you please find an explanation for free word order in Russian for example, where words get their case (an thematic role), and still can be placed freely in a sentence. Thank you!

[@incredulity]

It's because of cases we already know is it subject, object, whatever(i'm not the author of a channel, native russian speaker tho)

[@eruyommo]

I'm starting to see that when I end college, I will have studied the escence of comunication, but I will never be able to comunicate clearly with mortals. Linguistics is its own language.

[@Yvne6964]

Shouldn't we put a cp above every sentence ?

[@linguaphilly]

What *did* Paige say to pastor tim? Enough to get him killed? +1 for reliably sneaking in references

[@thelingspace]

Glad you liked it! We do try to get a good number of references in to things. And thanks for the other positive comments as well! ^_^

[@Valdagast]

Do we know what comes first - free word order or cases? What I mean is, do language first add cases and then free up word order or the other way around?

[@jordanstrul7356]

not a definitive answer but at this moment in time, languages are starting to lose cases e.g. german dative and genitive are disappearing and being combined with accusative and dative respectively. that doesn't mean cases came first though, free word order might've come first, but as the moment, cases are starting to fall away

[@verdakorako4599]

#I♥cases

[@thelingspace]

We do, too! ^_^

[@وردةالبنفسج-ذ5ظ]

hello 🌷I really like your vid👍 but I have aquestion why there is no vid about cognitive lingustics

[@thelingspace]

Glad you liked it! And we can add that to the topic list for the future. ^_^

[@prestonscott73]

I'll have to watch the video again, because with each new sentence I lost my concentration thinking about the characters in The Americans instead of the subject or object of the sentence.

[@bemk]

I like the fact you threw Irish in there, but I tink the phrase you meant was: "Tá mé ábalta cócaráil." By the way, what happens again to the tree when the words "Tá mé" are fused together into a single word: "Táim"? Irish has a lot of fun stuff going on by the way. For example, the initial consonant mutation of a word can affect the meaning of the word that goes before it. For example: "a cuid" means: "her share," whereas: "a chuid" means: "his share," and: "a gcuid" means: "their share." They also have weird things going on when counting (a haon = 1, a dó = 2, a trí =3, a ceathair =4, etc but duine amhain = one person, béirt = two people, triur = three people, ceathrar = four people, cuigear = five people, etc), and they have no words for yes, no or hello. Instead they answer by repeating the verb, or negating the verb in the question, and they say hello by playing a game of one up with blessings. "Dia daoibh." "Dia is Múire daoibh." "Dia is Múire is Pól doaibh" etc. (translating to: "God be with you." "God and Mary be with you." "God and Mary and Paul be with you"). It's just a really fun language in my opinion :D

[@xopowo1979]

there is a good book written in English by Andrew Carnie who compares English to Irish and how words are placed into that tree. Here is the link where you can download the book for free: Just click on "Download PDF" bookzz.org/md5/740B8E1914EE141E156B9D12544D7F37

[@impCaesarAvg]

Where would linguistics be without Chomsky?

[@thelingspace]

Somewhere really diferent, for sure! It's really amazing how big of an impact he's had on the field.

[@xopowo1979]

No one can ignore the Chomskyan Revolution, but, we must remember that ; first he worked on previous researches made by the distributional school led by Bloomfield and later on Zellig Harris. Even the Chomsky Theory has been developped by other people such as Pollock and Lasnik and many other people!

[@ElProfe78]

Nice your Newells shirt.

[@TelmanOcampoRamirez]

nice T-Shirt 👍

[@houndoom1234]

Nice beard :)

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! I will spare you the terrible pun I nearly wrote here. ^_^

[@frankharr9466]

Awwwww!

[@svarog8126]

You finally started utilizing your genetic hirsute blessing

[@wareya]

They sent me home a bill.