NEW METHOD OF SUBSTANTIATION OF ThE THEORY OF SEVEN CASES – 2017-3

Summary

Bagrat S. Nersisyan, Karine Zh. Sahakyan

Key words – syntagma, paradigm, abstract grammatical meaning, morpheme, grammatical synonymy, homonymy, absoluteness, accusativity, possessiveness, being dative, initiality, accompanying.

In this article, we attempt to single out seven cases in the literary Eastern Armenian language on the basis of the abstracted grammatical meanings of the cases, which are expressed by the corresponding morphemes. We believe that the paradigm and the syntagma need to be compared and not opposed, as a result of which it turns out that the case wordform is not only a morphological but also a syntactic category.

In our opinion, the accusative is a separate, independent case, since it cannot be characterized by the grammatical meaning of unlimitedness, absoluteness, which are inherent only in the nominative case. The accusative case of inanimate objects depends on the semantics of the transitive verb and is therefore characterized by accusativity. Nominative and accusative cases of the inanimate objects are grammatical homonyms.

The genitive and the dative are also independent cases: the genitive is characterized by being possessive, and the dative – by being dative. These are incompatible grammatical meanings. Therefore, despite the fact that these cases are formed by the same morphemes, they are not polysemantic wordforms, but homonymous different wordforms. Using the abstracted grammatical meanings inherent in the corresponding case forms put forward by E. Aghayan and G. Jahukyan, we come to the conclusion that each case is characterized by its inherent grammatical meaning. These are: nominative – unlimitedness, absoluteness, accusative – being accusative, genitive – possessiveness, dative – being dative, initial case – being initial, instrumental case – accompanying, local case – being at.

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