Case, agreement and reference

What case can do

Case is a grammatical form or marker associated with a noun phrase’s function or relation. A case named “genitive” may express possession, source, part-whole relations or the arguments of particular nouns, depending on the language. A “locative” may name a location, but its distribution cannot be inferred from that English label alone. Case may be shown by an affix, clitic, adposition, stem alternation or another construction; the word “case” is sometimes reserved more narrowly for inflection. State which use you intend.

A form has a case value in an analysis, yet its function must be read in the whole construction. One ending can be syncretic across cases, and one case can fill several syntactic roles. Do not translate a noun phrase as an agent solely because it is nominative, nor as possession solely because it is genitive. Identify the governing predicate or noun, compare attested parallels, and then explain the relation.

Agreement and cross-reference

Agreement is a systematic correspondence in features between elements, such as person and number on a verb matching an argument, or class on an adjective matching a noun. A marker may cross-reference an argument even when that noun phrase is absent. Distinguish agreement features from the referent’s actual properties: grammatical gender is a classification system and does not mean biological sex. Ask which controller is available, what feature values the construction permits, and whether the marker is obligatory.

WALS shows Tawala verbal marking for both A and P in one transitive clause. Other languages mark only one, or let hierarchy, clause polarity or aspect condition which participant is reflected on the verb. Thus a single third-person prefix cannot automatically be called “subject agreement” in every language. Check the grammar’s evidence and its period of description.

Possession and referential status

Attributive possession, which modifies a noun, and predicative possession, which asserts a possessive relationship, are different constructions. WALS begins its chapter on predicative possession with the English teaching sentence “John has a motorcycle” and explicitly excludes attributive possession from that survey. It documents have-like predicates alongside locative or existential arrangements in other languages. A historical text translated with English “has” may therefore require a grammatical description of a very different source-language construction. Also watch for definiteness, animacy and discourse accessibility: these can affect object marking and pronominal reference.

When a pronoun seems absent, test whether agreement alone licenses an unspoken referent. If the subject or object is omitted in a teaching translation, do not add a written word to the diplomatic transcription. Note “understood from agreement” in the analysis layer.

Practice

For one noun phrase, record its attested form, case analysis, controller or governor, agreement partners and proposed referent. Write separate reasons for each. Then try changing only the referent: does the form still support the same syntactic role? This exposes where semantic plausibility has been doing work that morphology cannot.