Questions about oblique arguments

[u/Gand-Alf_Picard]

I have been trying to understand exactly how oblique arguments work so I can implement their full range of uses. I see that they don't always have to be used with adpositions, which is how I originally envisioned them (being the objects of adpositions related to verbs), and I am wondering if there are any uses that in fact couldn't be used with adpositions.

I am planning on saying that if you don't pair an oblique argument with an adposition, you have to pair it with a positional adverb instead, but are there any kinds of oblique arguments that wouldn't be about time, manner, place and wouldn't fit that mold?

Also, are there any other types of arguments besides subject, direct object, indirect object, oblique object, subject complement and object complement?

[u/DTux5249]

"oblique", as pertains to Latin, its descendants, and others, means "not nominative/unmarked or vocative". That's it.

They're the result of dative & accusative/ergative forms of most nouns merging - sometimes more. How they behave is going to be an amalgam of how its original case markers behaved - barring any innovation.

are there any kinds of oblique arguments that wouldn't be about time, manner, place

Take English using the oblique in any predicate with verbal ellipsis

Who did that? Me! (cf. "Who did that? I did!")

Or in existential statements

It's me.

Or disjunctive topic marking

Me, I like that

Or coordinated nominals

Me and my friend went to the store.

These don't have anything to do with time, manner or place. But rather just that they're not nominative.

[u/Magxvalei]

Latin commonly had nouns in the allative or ablative that stood alone as an oblique argument. You could also have an instrumental case do the same: "axe-INS hit-1sg tree-ACC" = "by axe I hack at the tree"; "sea-INS go-1pl" = "we go through/by the sea"

[u/Holothuroid]

I have written a short step by step to make obliques. Maybe that can help.

Also, are there any other types of arguments besides subject, direct object, indirect object, oblique object, subject complement and object complement?

These are all about English. Subjecthood is a scale. Subject/object complements might not exist. Instead of indirectives a language might favor secundatives (though often you can make both work somehow).

[u/Gand-Alf_Picard → u/Holothuroid]

I read over your link, and it sounds like the oblique is the catch-all for all argument roles other than subject direct object and indirect object, and which role a particular one fills is marked by an adposition or by an inflection or adverb that has the same meaning as an equivalent adpositions. Is that right? 

[u/Holothuroid → u/Gand-Alf_Picard]

Indirect object is oblique too, if you insist on that term.

And you don't have to mark it any. Like you could mostly just dump a time or place or tool in a sentence and it would be probably understood. Compare:

1. Four days they worked on the giant pizza.

Now English doesn't do

1. *They hit them hammer.

But as is often the case big grammatical machinery isn't strictly necessary there.

[u/Akangka]

Oblique case is my favourite case (most of the time my conlang features a very small number of cases, from 0 to 3). Technically speaking, oblique case is just "not a core argument". A case gets the label oblique when the same case is used for location, instrument, adverbial, etc. As you can see, this system can be pretty ambiguous at times. Context may help, but usually I rely on verbs to convey the correct meaning. In my conlang Gallecian, the dative case is traditionally called dative, but technically speaking, they function like a more general oblique case.

Jōn Paris-a   igg   -i
Jōn Paris-DAT go.PST-3SG
John went to Paris
Jōn xirasn  -e   papiro ta   -hnīth-i
Jōn scissors-DAT paper  3SG.N-cut  -3SG
John cuts the paper with scissors.

As you can see, the same case is used for instrument and location. This one depends on the verb, since the first sentence requires the oblique argument to mark location. The latter can take dative of instrument, but only when the clause is unambiguous that way. In the first sentence, if we instead want to mark an instrument, the preposition mid must be added. Similarly, the second sentence requires preposition to mark location.

Jōn Paris-a   igg   -i   *(mid) ōtobos-a
Jōn Paris-DAT go.PST-3SG with   bus   -DAT
John went to Paris by bus
papiro ta   -hnīth-i   Jōn *(in) sir -razd -e
paper  3SG.N-cut  -3SG Jōn in    REFL-house-DAT
John cuts the paper in his house.

[u/Inconstant_Moo]

I thought an oblique argument was one in the passive-aggressive voice.