Introduction

The Tamil Case system is analyzed in native and missionary grammars (henceforth NMG) as consisting of a finite number of cases (realized morphologically as nominal or pronominal suffixes), to some of which postpositional suffixes may be added. In these traditional analyses there is always a clear distinction made between postpositional morphemes and case endings. Thus the usual treatment of Tamil case (Arden 1942) is one where there are seven cases--the nominative (first case), accusative (second case), instrumental (third), dative (fourth), ablative (fifth), genitive (sixth), and locative (seventh). The vocative is sometimes given a place in the case system as an eighth case, although vocative forms do not participate in usual morphophonemic alternations, nor do they govern the use of any postpositions.

What a typical NMG grammar of Tamil gives as a description of the case system of modern Literary Tamil (Arden 1942:75) is given in Table 1.

 

Table: Arden's Literary Tamil Case System.

The problem with such a rigid classification is that it fails in a number of important ways adequately to account for both the inventory of case morphemes, or for syntactic constraints of various sorts on the system. That is, it is neither an accurate description of the number and shape of the morphemes involved in the system, nor of the syntactic behavior of those morphemes (and other morphemes, especially verbs, that control the occurrence of particular case markers). It is based on an assumption that there is a clear and unerring way to distinguish between case and postpositional morphemes in the language, when in fact there is no clear distinction. It fails to deal with variation in the system, whether in the syntax or the morphology. In fact, none of these problems with the NMG analyses is news to anyone who has studied the case system in detail, but this study may be the first to catalogue these problems in a systematic way. Let us therefore begin by examining these problems in the order already presented.

(I shall violate continually the rule that diachronic and synchronic descriptions should not be mixed, because to separate out descriptions of various stages of the history of Tamil for separate treatment would then require repeating what are essentially the same complaints about the analyses of the system--the problems tend to be the same, no matter what stage of the language we are dealing with.)

To summarize the problems:

1.

What are the case morphemes and their phonological shapes?

2.

What is their syntactic behavior?

3.

How do we distinguish between case morphemes and postpositional morphemes?

4.

How do we deal with variation in the system, especially variation that is controlled by pragmatic considerations, rather than purely syntactic ones?

5.

What special problems do we encounter when dealing with modern Spoken Tamil?

6.

Would the best analysis of this system in fact be one that treats it as whole system rather than case versus postpositions?