Disputats, Amsterdam 1991. / Med nederlandsk resumé: Datieven in het Frans.

This diploma thesis deals with the topic of the variation in genitive and dative government. The subject of analysis are the following thirteen prepositions: (an)statt, innerhalb, längs, mangels, mittels, trotz, während, wegen, zugunsten/zu Gunsten; binnen, dank, laut, zufolge. The aim of the thesis is to capture the use of the mentioned prepositions as detailed as possible. The focus is on the question and the attempt to determine in which cases within the variation in prepositional case government in the written language one or the other case is preferred and whether certain tendencies or systematics common to all thirteen prepositions can be followed. The prepositions are analysed by means of nine selected sources (both dictionaries and grammar books) and German reference corpus.

This thesis disserts on problem of translation of dative relations in Karel Čapek's "Tales from two pockets" into Japanese. Goal of the thesis is to identify and describe means of expression of dative in Japanese translation and figure out if there are any differences in interpretaion and expressing dative in Czech and Japanese and what they are. Using method of excerption of example sentences and comparation of original with translated version, I organised the example sentences into six categories according to linguistic means of expressing equivalent of Czech dative used in Japanese translation. In these six categories, there are included both grammatical and semanthic expressions and idioms and phrases. The result is the detection of the main difference in degree of necessity to express a dative subject explicitly. There is a strong tendency of Japanese to implicit expression of dativ subject by means of special expressions of personal orientation, semanthics of predicate or context.

Faroese is known to lie grammatically between Icelandic and the Mainland Scandinavian languages and dialects. One example of this is that, on the one hand, Faroese is like Icelandic in having a basically intact morphological four case system. On the other hand case-marking in Faroese is linked to clause function to a greater degree than in Icelandic – but to a lesser degree than in the Mainland Scandinavian standard languages. In Scandinavian Linguistics, it has long been an axiom that in the longer term the aforementioned four case system will be reduced in all varieties of the Scandinavian languages. The present thesis investigates if, and if so how, this expected development manifests itself in Senior High School graduation essays in Faroese from the period 1940–1999. A quantitative study forms the core of the thesis. The choice between the dative and other cases is related to eight syntactic variables whose effect on the choice of case is compared using methods from the variationist framework, among others. The results are partly surprising: the dative did not reduce in frequency from the 1940s to 1990s. There certainly is a tendency, however not a statistically significant one, that the dative is more often replaced by another case in contexts where the norm is to use the dative. On the other hand it also seems to become more common for the dative to be used hypercorrectly. Furthermore, the development is not linear, in that around the middle of the investigation period, the dative is used far more according to norms than otherwise. As expected, clause function is an important variable, but by the end of the period under investigation the placement of the nominal phrase within the clause becomes a surprisingly strong factor. It also becomes more important if the phrase takes the form of a first/second-person pronominal or not. The results are theoretically interpreted in the light of, firstly, Generative Grammar, and secondly Construction Grammar. The modification of certain terms is discussed, such as lexical case in Generative Grammar or usage-based model in Construction Grammar. The conclusion is that the linguistic descriptive models of these theories can only partly cover the tendencies to change that are observed. Other parts of the results are best explained using aspects of sociolinguistics. The conclusion is that case studies on a micro-level are valuable in order to evaluate and develop theories of linguistic variation and change at a macro-level.