The Ao dialects go one step further and are universally unique in sharing a case syncretism involving not only the above-mentioned agentive and instrumental cases, but also an
allative case. The following Mongsen Ao proverb demonstrates these three case relations in the one clause:
The phenomena under discussion concern the negative modal verb 'not want', the predicative conjugation of nouns and adjectives in the past tense and the function of the allative case. In the following, I will show that concerning these three Nganasan morphosyntactic peculiarities, it is problematic to postulate a common Northern Samoyedic origin.
The function of the Nganasan allative case and parallels in Evenki
The latter is a frequent Hittite word meaning 'forehead, front' and the usual assumption has been that menahhanda is a compound of two nouns in allative case, 'face' and 'forehead'.
The allative case (17) (also known as directive, Richtungskasus, or Terminativ) was identified at the very beginning of Hittite studies.
In Finnish, recipients of 'give' can take the
allative case, as in (55).
For goal-directed configurations the ground is marked by the
allative case marker -sa/-se (14a, 14c) whereas in source-directed configurations the source-NP is marked by the ablative case marker -sen (14b, 14c), cf.
What her own data shows is that Tocharian uses the locative case for ILLATIVE and the
allative case for ALLATIVE and DIRECTIONAL.
the extension of the
allative case in Finnish), (ii) secundative alignment (cf.
The
allative case generally designates a goal, a location entered by a moving entity, but since (10) and (11) are existential sentences, the directionality of the allative also needs to be understood in the existential sense.
Third, where locative case suffixes are missing, the underlying governor
ALLATIVE case, which is phonologically empty anyhow, is assumed to be missing as well.
A completely different way of looking at the preposition-article complexes would be not as "inflected prepositions," but as an expansion of the case inventory of definite articles: im would be an inessive case, yom an ablative case, and zur an
allative case of the definite article.