The number of cases in relation to language contact

The number of cases in relation to language contact

Kovačević, Borko
Junichi, Toyota

The number of cases in the world languages can vary significantly, ranging from no morphological case marking (e.g. English) to more than ten cases (e.g. Ket, language isolate, Siberia). The distribution of the case marking pattern may appear to be random, but it is in fact systematic (Iggesen 2010). This paper examines the number of cases in the productive case paradigm in relation to langauge contact in the past. There are some areas in the world that saw much intense contact among neighboring languages and dialects of a single language, i.e. intense contacts in the past force the case to be simplified and the total number of cases will be reduced. This is mainly due to the fact that speakers shifted their attention from expressing details of their information to classifying details of information (cf. Durst-Andersen 2011). This type of contact-induced changes can be found in other areas of grammatical items, such as the creation of definite articles (e.g. Toyota and Kovacevic forthcoming). Thus, contacts have a very significant impact on grammatical structure of modern languages.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05-04

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