Comitative case

Abstract: 1. Introduction to case, animacy and semantic roles (by Kittila, Seppo) 2. Remarks on the coding of Goal, Recipient and Vicinal Goal in European Uralic (by Kittila, Seppo) 3. A case in search of an independent life: The semantics of the initial allative in a Finnish verbless construction (by Vasti, Katja) 4. The division of labour between synonymous locative cases and adpositions: The Estonian adessive and the adposition peal 'on' (by Klavan, Jane) 5. Is there a future for the Finnish comitative?: Arguments against the putative synonymy of the comitative case -ine and the postposition kanssa (by Sirola-Belliard, Maija) 6. Animacy and spatial cases: Typological tendencies, and the case of Basque (by Creissels, Denis) 7. There's more than "more animate": The Organization/Document Construction in Korean (by Song, Jae Jung) 8. The coding of spatial relations with human landmarks: From Latin to Romance (by Luraghi, Silvia) 9. A survey of the origins of directional case suffixes in European Uralic (by Ylikoski, Jussi) 10. Dutch spatial case (by Lestrade, Sander) 11. Case on the margins: Pragmatics and argument marking in Vaeakau-Taumako and beyond (by Naess, Ashild) 12. Why should beneficiaries be subjects (or objects)?: Affaction and grammatical relations (by Zuniga, Fernando)

Abstract: This paper deals with both the synchronic distribution and the diachronic change of comitative verbal forms in Philippine languages. Three research questions are addressed in this paper. First, how is the notion of comitativity encoded morphosyntactically in Philippine languages? Second, is there any formative that is commonly used to encode comitativity in Philippine languages? If there is, can such formative(s) be reconstructed for the immediate ancestor language of all Philippine languages? Third, does the common comitative marking have other functions? If so, can we posit a path for the development of these functions? Comparative data will also be drawn from other Malayo-Polynesian languages.

Abstract: This article critically assesses probabilistic predictions on the theory of contact-induced grammaticalization of the comitative-instrumental polysemy in those Slavic languages which have had a history of long and intense interaction with either German or Italian. Having provided extensive dialectal data, I argue instead that there are no grounds for positing a direct correlation between the introduction of the comitative preposition to instrumental in “high-contact” Slavic languages and the history of language contact with German or Italian. I propose to distinguish between the grammaticalization of the comitative-instrumental polysemy due to analytic simplification and the grammaticalization of the instrumental-comitative polysemy due to synthetic simplification. The comitative marking for instrumentals in Slavic is likely to develop in places of prolonged multilingual contacts, not necessarily with German or Italian. Under these conditions one can predict the development of convergent analytic features in closely related or even areally contingent languages (dialects), as is the case of the Circum-Baltic area.