Terminological principles

Most traditional terms designating cases and adpositions are Latin-based (some are Greek, some of 21st cent. provenience are English). A new term should fit in existent terminology. Therefore, the first requirement for a new case term is that it be Latinate.¹

Most traditional case terms are derived from verbs, more precisely, from the perfect participle of some plurivalent verb. The term formation presupposes a construction in which the nominal expression marked by the case in question has some oblique syntactic function vis-à-vis that verb. Here are a few examples:

The first two examples illustrate the model literally. The third example shows that it is used for languages other than Latin independently of the existence of the case in question in Latin. The point here is that in the valency of the name-giving verb, the case to be named is born by some oblique dependent C; it is not the subject X. This is the principle by which new case terms are assessed.

Specimen: the caritive

An interesting example is provided by the name for the caritive case. Apart from caritive, this case has been named abessive and privative. These terms originate in separate philological traditions, designate similar phenomena and are treated as synonymous by some linguists (including the English wikipedia 2021). They all refer to a situation where C is absent from X or from the situation whose protagonist X is. In other words, X lacks C or is without C. The following is an attempt at a differentiation which pays attention to

1. the meaning of these Latinate terms
2. the distribution and function of the formatives and the structure of the constructions in question.

Ad #1:

• Latin X abest a C-ablative means ‘X is missing from C’. C is in an oblique role, marked by the preposition a, which in turn governs the ablative.
• Latin X caret C-ablative means ‘X lacks/misses C’. C is in an oblique role.
• Latin X privat Y-accusative C-ablative means ‘X deprives Y of C’. C is in an oblique role.

The Latin ablative, with or without the preposition a(b), marks a nominal clause component from which something is separated. Since Latin lacks an abessive/caritive/privative case, this is the closest that Latin can muster in this semantic area. In all three paraphtases, C is the entity so marked.

Ad #2:

is a typical example of the caritive.

As is clear from (as well as from all the phenomena that have customarily been designated by one of the three terms), the nominal expression marked for the caritive is the missing object, C in the introductory characterization. The caritive is, so to speak, the negative counterpart to the instrumental or proprietive, which indicate that something is available. Now in the paraphrasis for the abessive, the missing object is X, which bears no oblique role in it. As a consequence, abessive is a less appropriate term for the case in question.

Now as for ‘privative’, the problem is rather with the meaning of the verb. The case in question marks an entity which is not there. It does not mark an entity which is being removed or taken away, as the Latin verb privare implies. As a consequence, the term ‘privative’ might be reserved for a dynamic version of the caritive. It might, theoretically, because actually this has been the established term for a particular type of binary opposition since Trubetzkoy 1939: 67.

¹ A well known Greek-based term is ergative. An unknown example is metexitive, a term used for some years to name an unparalleled case of the Cabecar language. It was replaced by dispositive mainly for the reason that case terms are Latin-based.

Trubetzkoy, Nikolaj S. 1939, Grundzüge der Phonologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (TCLP, 7)