Re: Noun and Pronoun flexion in contemporary English

Am 16 Jul 2006 15:24:14 -0700 schrieb mb:

Joachim Pense wrote:
mb wrote:

Joachim Pense wrote:
Am 16 Jul 2006 04:07:38 -0700 schrieb mb:

Joachim Pense wrote:
Am 16 Jul 2006 01:00:28 -0700 schrieb mb:
modern English the tenses etc. lead to a conjugation (or
declination?) of the subject, as in

he'll go
Peter's going
we've done it

Is there a name for this kind of flexion? Would it make sense to
call "he'll" a case of "he"?

Do you mean as in:
*he'll went?
???

Why the signs? If your hypothesis makes "he'll" a declension of the
subject, the subject is he'll, and it gives:he'll went, he'll will go,
he'll is going etc.


But you cannot say *his went, *his will go, *his is going, event
though "his" is a declension of "he"

Because "his" is not subject case. You projected a grammaticalization
of "he'll" as flexion, but I don't think you explained that it would
apply to anything else than subject case

It would of course be a new case. Like "Future subject case". That's what my
question was about.

Hm. Not entirely illogical either, but that assumes two major changes
instead of one.
[List the cases for each subject, like [hI] / [wI] - continuous, [hIs]
/ [wIr] - aorist/past, [hIl] - future subject case. Then list which
subject pronouns come to be declined and which not. Then look at the
hypothesis of a plain subject case, or just the replacement of the
unmarked pronoun. More than one change is required to realize each
scenario].

I see only one change (or group of changes if you wish), the
incorporation of auxiliaries into the subject. If I got you right, you
are talking about the changes that have to be done in the grammar if
you want to describe the forms as inflections rather than an
"abbreviation".

If there are major phonetic shifts elsewhere to precipitate
this kind of change, everything is possible; yours would be one of many
different possibilities for the grammaticalization of the contracted
verbs.

What I wanted to know in my original posting was if such an effect
(tense/aspect-marking by inflecting the subject) is a known phenomenon
in languages.

Joachim
.

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