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The phrases mirti bad-u (‘to die hunger-ins.sg’), mirti iš bad-o (‘to die iš hunger-gen.sg’), mirti nuo bad-o (‘to die nuo hunger-gen.sg’) are generally considered to be synonymous ways to express a cause of death. Still, if the instrumental case, the preposition iš and the preposition nuo may be interchangeable without a difference of interpretation in this expression out of context, these three syntactic constructions cannot be considered equivalent: precise analysis of the contexts where these constructions occur shows that each construction corresponds to a specific semantic value, which distinguishes it from the other two. In sum, these the syntactic constructions provide three different representations of the event ‘die of hunger’, hence, in some contexts, the substitution of one construction for another is not possible. The analysis of this micro phenomenon will enable us to extend our study to other expressions involving a cause, to propose definitions of the semantics of the instrumental case and of the prepositions iš and nuo and finally to observe that ‘cause’ is a complex label covering very different situations which arise directly from the forms constructing them.

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This article analyzes three cases of competition between a preposition and its corresponding case or the use of the case by itself. It shows that the difference between the two types of constructions is always the same: the case alone is used to express an unmarked relationship, whereas the prepositional phrase + the corresponding case is used to focus on one of its aspects. This could be analyzed in terms of ‘iconicity of motivation’, as the instance marked semantically (with focalization) is also marked syntactically insofar as two markers co-occur. However, the author shows that this analysis which directly links form and meaning without taking into account the linguistic operations implemented by the linguistic forms, is unsatisfactory. She proposes an alternative analysis based on the hypothesis that a case and a preposition are ‘relators’ and explains that the focalization observed in the constructions with two relators (case+preposition) is not so much due to the fact that more markers are used, but to the fact that two semantically close relationships involving the same terms are fully implemented.