Die Funktionen der lokalen Kasus im Tocharischen.

• Author: Melchert, H. Craig
• Position: Reviews of Books

Die Funktionen der lokalen Kasus im Tocharischen. By GERD CARLING. Berlin: MOUTON DE GRUYTER, 2000. Pp. xxii + 442. DM 178.

The author begins with a sketch of the entire Tocharian case system, a brief summary of the conceptual framework and associated terminology that she employs, and an overview of the textual sources. The core of the book is a systematic analysis of how Tocharian uses nominal cases (chiefly the oblique, perlative, allative, and locative) and adpositions to express local (and temporal) relationships. The analysis is based on an effectively exhaustive survey of the available Tocharian text corpus. The book closes with a chapter on the reconstruction of the Proto-Tocharian case system, an English summary, bibliography, and useful indices of verbs and passages cited. (1)

The introduction to Tocharian case syntax is lucid and succinct, and the theoretical apparatus brought to bear is both relevant and adequate to the task (not merely paraded for show). Carling reads the texts carefully and sensitively and for the most part resists the temptation to force recalcitrant passages into her overall system, honestly confronting the fact that some examples remain problematic or obscure. She initially organizes the data in terms of the most likely factors that might influence the choice of a particular local case for a given example (chiefly the matrix verb and the nature of the spatial/reference object), not along the lines of her own functional analysis. This unprejudiced presentation of the data has the great merit of allowing readers to judge easily the basis for and validity of her eventual analysis and to suggest possible revisions or alternatives.

As to her analysis, Carling confirms earlier claims that the directional use of the oblique case in Tocharian is an archaic and recessive usage reflecting the PIE "accusative of direction." Her most important original contribution is to have largely untangled the very complex functions of the Tocharian perlative and its relationship to the locative. She shows that the perlative expresses a tangential (in her terms "incoherent") relationship to the reference object ("at, by, over, along, through") versus the locative ("in"). Also useful is her suggestion that the perlative tends to be used with unbounded spaces ("earth") vs. the locative with hounded ("house"). I suggest, however, that the more important distinction is rather that the perlative is used for spatial objects with...