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On 20 March 2012 23:40, Alex Fink <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:16:30 -0400, Roman Rausch <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > >>but somehow surdeclinaison has > >>been ignored so far, despite the fact that its distant cousin > >>Suffixaufnahme is a well known denizen here... > > > >Yeah, what's actually the difference between the two? "Suffixaufnahme" is > >when all the words in a noun phrase receive the case ending, not just the > >head noun; while surdeclinaison is more general? > >(Sorry - I'm writing in ascii, so no accent aigu..) > > I think the distinction being drawn is as follows. > > Suffixaufnahme is when modifiers of a noun must _agree_ in case, even if > they're already case-inflected NPs (or something else complex): > "(I gave it) to a man from Bilbao" man.DAT Bilbao.ABL.*DAT* > That's basically it: Suffixaufnahme is a phenomenon of *agreement*, and happens only in languages that have word marking, i.e. all participants in a noun phrase must be marked for the function of that noun phrase. Suffixaufnahme just takes that rule without exception, i.e. it marks all participants for the function of the phrase, even if they are already inflected. > Surdéclinaison is when modifiers of a noun must take _the basic case for > modifiers to a noun_, typically genitive, even if they're already > case-inflected NPs (or something else complex): > "(I gave it) to a man from Bilbao" man.DAT Bilbao.ABL.*GEN* > > That's only one aspect of surdéclinaison, converting adverbial phrases into noun modifiers. Surdéclinaison has many other aspects, including but not limited to: - nominalisation of noun modifiers (to make the equivalent of "at the neighbour's"). - nominalisation of relative clauses (to render "the one that..." or "whoever/whatever/..."). - formation of adverbial subclauses by inflecting conjugated verbs using noun cases (I will discuss that in my next post). - all kinds of restricted patterns and one-offs, which can be used to create new lexical items (for instance, in Moten the word for "week" is _negesizdan_, which is actually an inflected form meaning "for seven days"). And I'm sure you could imagine many more things to do. Those are just the patterns of surdéclinaison that appear in Moten (and similarly in Basque). That's the power of surdéclinaison: it's far broader than Suffixaufnahme, to which it bears only a passing similarity (I'm nearly sure they are actually incompatible: Suffixaufnahme requires word marking, surdéclinaison seems to require group marking, i.e. marking NPs for function only once, a the edge of the phrase). -- Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets. http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/ http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/