I asked a little while back about phrases like "ag gabháil an bóthair síos". After finding the PDF of vol 1 of Nolan's Studies in Modern Irish, I find that this is indeed accusative.

Pages 214 and 215 of the PDF at http://ia341341.us.archive.org/3/items/cu31924026785174/cu31924026785174.pdf show that the following are accusative:

do ghluais sé an bóthar ó thuaidh
d'imthigh sé an cnoc suas

It seems to me that Nolan's works are invaluable as a very thorough breakdown of Irish grammar. I must go through this book!

I don't get it. How does the accusative demonstrate itself in these sentences? In my analysis, things like "an bóthar ó thuaidh" and "an cnoc suas" are simply noun phrases in the nominative (or "common") case followed by an adverbial.

Why would the nominative be there? Mbm, you speak a case language (Czech) - doesn't Czech have noun phrases in the accusative? Russian does - maybe Czech doesn't. Look at this in Russian:

всю дорогу, они шли молча

the noun phrase всю дорогу is in the accusative in Russian. What do you do in Czech?

There is no separate morphological accusative case. So bóthar and cnoc are both in the bunfhoirm - they are both nominative morphologically. But the bunfhoirm now comprises both nominative and accusative functions.

Did you download the PDF of Nolan's Studies in Modern Irish volume 1 - there are several pages on the accusative there.

Ag gabháil an bóthar síos: one would expect a genitive if the noun were parsed as being the object of the verbal noun (and occasionally ag gabháil an bhóthair is found, with no "síos"). The reason it is not genitive is that it is an accusative noun phrase.

I see now. We are disagreeing only on terminology, not on content. You apparently use terms like "nominative" and "accusative" as labels for *functions*. I, on the other had, use "nominative" and "accusative" only as labels for *forms*, and I'd use "subject" and "direct object" as labels for the functions. With that in mind, we are in complete agreement.

In my analysis, the reason why "bóthar" is not in the genitive form in the expression "ag gabháil an bóthar síos" is because there is a rule in Irish grammar that goes something like this:

- If there is a noun (bóthar) which has the function of being the direct object of a verbal noun (gabháil), then it must have the genitive form: ag gabháil an bhóthair.

- - But, if the noun is accompanied by an adverbial (síos), then the noun must have the nominative form (or "bunfhoirm"): an gabháil an bóthar síos.

Which is basically the same thing you are positing but expressed in different terms.

Yes- it may confuse the matter for many people to start describing things as accusative. Basically, if some other explanation works, go for it.

Oh, and to answer your other question: In Czech, nouns do indeed have different accusative and nominative forms. A noun, when it is the direct object of a verb, normally has the accusative form.

In Irish, however, nouns that appear as direct objects of verbs have the same form as nouns that appear as subjects of verbs. Therefore there is no need to distinguish between "nominative" and "accusative" at the level of noun forms. There are, however, two different functions, namely "subject" and "direct object".

But that's only *my* terminology. I like to separate form and function strictly.

>>>In Czech, nouns do indeed have different accusative and nominative forms. A noun, when it is the direct object of a verb, normally has the accusative form.


No - this is not what I was asking. The point is: in Czech do noun phrases ("last year", "down the road", "all the way") go in the accusative. This is nothing to do with whether Czech has a direct object.

quote:

The point is: in Czech do noun phrases ("last year", "down the road", "all the way") go in the accusative. This is nothing to do with whether Czech has a direct object.

"Last year" is translated into Czech as an adverb ("loni"), so the question doesn't apply.

"Down the road" is translated as an adverbial phrase ("dolů po ulici") - a phrase headed by an adverb - so the question doesn't apply either.

"All the way" does translate as a noun phrase, and yes, it would be in the accusative form when used in a sentence like this:

celou cestu šli mlčky
they walked silently all the way)
cognate of: всю дорогу, они шли молча

"Celou cestu" is an accusative form of "celá cesta" (the whole way). Functionally, I'm not sure if it is a direct object or some sort of adjunct.

>>>Functionally, I'm not sure if it is a direct object or some sort of adjunct.

I am not sure you understand grammatical cases - and that surprises me in someone who speaks a case language. Celou cestu is not a direct object in this sentence.

A direct object is a direct object of a verb. I take the money - money is the direct object. If there is no verb, there is nothing to be direct object of.

Most/all European case languages use the accusative in noun phrases. Latin has "multos annos" (for many years). German has "Diesen Abend" (this evening). This has nothing to do with the direct object of the verb.

In the sentence "celou cestu šli mlčky", there is a verb ("šli") and I was suggesting that "celou cestu" is perhaps its direct object.

As for your usage of "noun phrase" we seem to be diverging on terminology again. You seem to say "a noun phrase" when I would say "a noun phrase that functions as an adjunct". In my book, "noun phrase" is a broader term. There are three noun phrases in the sentence "they kicked his arse all day": "they" (functioning as subject), "his arse" (functioning as direct object) and "all day" (functioning as some sort of adjunct or something). Only the last one probably qualifies as "noun phrase" in your book.

You are right that many languages use the accusative form for a noun phrase that functions as an adjunct. That's an interesting observation.

My suggestion that "celou cestu" in "celou cestu šli mlčky" is a direct object of "šli" was probably a bad idea. I was led astray by its accusative form. Which again shows how easy it is to confuse form and function.

Yes, I see where you are coming from. By the way, I would suggest "kicked his backside" as more appropriate to polite conversation. I know you are Czech and maybe do not know that the word you used is classed as "foul language". In fact, I am surprised the forum software didn't filter it out.

Ah well, I don't give a rat's backside about that.

Sorry, feel free to ignore this, I don't want to interrupt your discussion but this feels like as good a chance as I will get hehe

re. Ag gabháil an bóthar síos

Can anyone tell me would this be used in spoken Irish, 'ag gabháil síos an bóthar' sounds more likely, if more obvious.

Would ag gabháil an bóthar síos be found more likely in the literature rather than spoken Irish maybe?

No, no, "an bóthar síos" (or "an bóthar siar" or what have you) is alive and well. It's what direction the road goes rather than what direction you're going.

"ag dul siar an bóthar" - going back along the road
"ag dul an bóthar siar" - taking the road back (i.e. the road that goes back)

Not that there's much difference between the two generally, but that's how I've learned it.

Sineadw, it was my mistake. Síos an bóthar it is. Although, suas an cnoc is right too - but that sentence from O'Nolan's book shows "an cnoc suas". An doras amach.

Ah great, I get it now. I forgot about the other meaning and was just thinking of 'going down the road'!

David, you use the terms that are well-established in linguistics in an idiosyncratic way which makes it difficult to interpret what you're trying to get across. I'm curious where you learnt to refer to the Direct Object as accusative case, and it's a mystery to me how you define noun phrase. I suggest that you switch to the traditional terminology.

By the way, it's no surprise to me that MBM was uncertain whether "all the way" is an adjunct or an argument of the verb in this sentence. I remember pointing it out here that the perfective derivative "пройти" can take the same noun phrase as its complement: Весь путь они прошли молча. I would think the same is possible in Czech and so could cause confusion.

>>I'm curious where you learnt to refer to the Direct Object as accusative case

Peter, look through the thread. It is Mbm who confuses the direct object and the accusative case. What I was talking about had nothing to do with the direct object at all!

D'imigh sé an cnoc suas = I argued that an cnoc was in the accusative NOT that it was the direct object of imigh.

I don't know what you mean by the accusative case, particularly when you subsume morphology and syntax under it.

I'm lazy to go through the thread again, but my impression was that Michal was clear on this point: he talked of the thingies as Direct Object v. Adjunct in syntax, and referred to cases the way they are commonly understood - morphologically (unless somebody is heavily into some form of Chomskyan linguistics).

As you said, Peter, you're too lazy to go through the thread and see that I never referred to a direct object in any of my posts!

If you had managed to get as far as the very first post in this thread, you would have found this:

Pages 214 and 215 of the PDF at http://ia341341.us.archive.org/3/items/cu31924026785174/cu31924026785174.pdf show that the following are accusative:

To see what I was referring to, you would have needed to open the link. How simple is that?

I did that, thanks. I was curious to see why the author was calling the forms accusative. Apparently (I had to consider some other examples from the other places in the text, e.g. bits on verbal nouns), the author used accusative to refer to the default form of the noun appearing in the positions other than the Subject (at least, of non-copular clauses). Is this also your view on this matter? Then, this use is unfortunate because as I already said you define it both morphologically and syntactically. Isn't it easier to speak of the default morphological form of noun and then distinguish between grammatical functions of the noun (phrase)? Well, that's at least what is traditionally done.

I see that you have had a hard time defending your views in other threads here. If I had gone through the threads top down, I wouldn't have bothered you with this bit of terminological critique.

Peter, I don't have a hard time defending my views. Rather, I am constantly assailed by people who object to my preference for the Irish dialects.

I think Gerald O'Nolan's book is quite wonderful. He was a remarkable man.

You are trying to get into the semantics of whether he referred to the accusative case morphologically or to the accusative function of what is the "default form of the noun" morphologically.

Actually, the default form of the noun could (could!) be referred to, not as nominative, but as nominative-accusative (or just the base form).

O'Nolan's book is quite self-explanatory on this point.

I'm sure the book is a valuable source but I wouldn't rely on it conceptually: the view on grammar expressed in it is valid for 1909 but is outdated in the present-day context. I would argue that no "accusative function" exists per se. Cross-linguistically, what linguists call the accusative morphological case differs greatly in the syntactic functions this form has. The general idea why people speak of the accusative in various unrelated languages is that the MAIN syntactic function that the noun in the accusative case has is the Direct Object. And this is true of all other cases: they are defined through the main syntactic function that they express (that is, the nominative is the case of the Subject, the dative is the case of the Indirect Object, etc.). Oblique cases can be defined with respect to some other, usually non-syntactic, property.

Again, what counts in the definition of a core case is its main syntactic function. This means that a noun in the accusative case can also have other syntactic functions, e.g. Adjunct as in the Russian and Czech sentences above.

Coming back Irish, you don't get much out of positing the accusative morphological case for Irish nouns. There is no evidence for it, unlike Latin or Russian where there is overt morphological marking. And again, referring to the "accusative function" would lead you into a vicious circle.

Peter, I think that your approach would work better for most people than my approach. Can you imagine if students studying English were told that "last week" was in the accusative in English - owing to some analogy with Latin - when no such case exists in English? It would confuse them. In Irish linguistics there is tradition, whether noble or ignoble, of trying to identify "ablative" functions in modern Irish. Nineteenth-century textbooks are notorious for that. Of course, the reason was the casual assumption that all educated people were fluent in Latin, which is no longer an assumption that can be made.

But Nolan's book answered a question for me. I noticed that although PUL said "ag gabháil an bhóthair" he also said (in nearly all cases) "ag gabháil an bóthar" -- and a word search of PUL's works shows that he often said the latter when there was no "síos" attached. I presume that PUL had a wonderful mastery of Irish and could write impeccably, but as nearly all native speakers of English make mistakes in their English (when they don't re-read what they've written), typos and the like could be expected of PUL in his Irish - particularly in the years before word processors. But working on the assumption that these were not typos, I searched for an explanation.

The description of the function as "accusative" clearly depends on knowledge of the grammar of other European languages (German, Latin etc). Similarly, you could say that "last week" was functionally accusative in English, but this amounts to saying "it performs a function analogous to the accusative in other languages" - and this is clearly of no help to people who are not conversant with those languages, and of little help even to those who are. Of course, there is a large debate in the UK re: the references to Latin in historical descriptions of English grammar, eg the prohibition of the split infinitive, said to have come about because the infinitive is one word in Latin.

For me, the way my mind works, saying that bóthar is nominative does not explain why is SHOULD be nominative. Why is it "ag gabháil an bóthar"? Glancing at the accusative case in other European languages answers that question for me. Another example I posted about a while back was where comparative adjectives are followed by an abstract noun: "fir ba threise aigne ná ba ghéire caint". You might expect "ba ghéire cainte", but in fact it is "ba ghéire caint". I can wrap my head around that by saying that "caint" is in the bunfhoirm, but the function is essentially accusative (or what would be accusative in some other languages): "sharper-witted with respect to speech". These things MAY be derived from morphological accusatives in Middle Irish -- I just don't know.

I prefer to know the origin and reason for things, and when reading Mo Sgéal Féin, my approach, which slows me down, is to identify the tense of every verb and the case of every noun, so that I am 100% sure of the meaning. I have been told here not to do that - but just to read for the meaning. But I am a student, so I want to get the most from what I am reading. My primary reason for reading the book is not in fact to absorb the book's meaning.

Linguistic Glossary says:

Accusative case is the case in nominative-accusative languages that marks certain syntactic functions, usually direct objects.

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAccusativeCase.ht m

I think some of this terminology was a remnant of the Latin based grammatical education. An actual accusative in Irish is just as rare as it is in English.

Common case seems to be the most appropriate term now, but I have books that are less than five years old that still use the nominative and accusative case terms.

quote:

These things MAY be derived from morphological accusatives in Middle Irish -- I just don't know.

Doubtful. As far as I can make out (from a few hours' rooting around in SnaG and the DIL) this construction doesn't appear at all until Early Modern Irish, by which time the nominative and accusative had converged.

>>Doubtful. As far as I can make out (from a few hours' rooting around in SnaG and the DIL) this construction doesn't appear at all until Early Modern Irish, by which time the nominative and accusative had converged.

That's very interesting. Abigail, you said before you would post your findings from SnaG. I hope you find time to do so in greater detail.