Re: Of of

* Peter Bleackley said on 2006-03-28 10:27:09 +0200
> Consider a language where the genitive construction is of the form
> PARTICLE POSSESSOR POSSESSED /snip/
AFMCL:

(1) The King's horse
(2) The King's knight's horse

Since all three nouns are animate, this is very easy in Taruven:

(1) King te horse /
    horse te King
(2) King te knight te horse /
    King te horse te knight /
    knight te King te horse /
    knight te horse te King /
    horse te King te knight /
    horse te knight te King

As you might have noticed from example 2) above, "te" doesn't build a
hierarchy of who own who, since animates can't be owned in Taruven and
hence cannot be part of such a hierarchy.

Now in the original example 2, King modifies knight which modifies
horse, therefore giving more focus to the horse. In Taruven you'd have
to use an emphasis-prefix on horse to achieve the same thing.

It becomes more interesting with only inanimate nouns though:

(1) the cloud's color
(2) the sky's cloud's color

Which would be (the underline marks morpheme-boundaries):

(1) cloud_GEN+ color_GEN- /
    color_GEN- cloud-GEN+
(2) sky_GEN+ cloud_GEN+_GEN- color_GEN- /
    sky_GEN+ color_GEN-_GEN- cloud_GEN+_GEN- /
    cloud_GEN+_GEN- sky_GEN+ color_GEN-_GEN- /
    cloud_GEN+_GEN- color_GEN- sky_GEN+ /
    color_GEN-_GEN- sky_GEN+ cloud_GEN+_GEN- /
    color_GEN-_GEN- cloud_GEN+_GEN- sky_GEN+

GEN+ marks the possessor, and can be dropped. GEN- marks possession, and
cannot be dropped. The normal order is "A owns B", if B doesn't
immediately follow A you get Suffixaufnahme on B, if there are more than
two in the possession-chain, as is the case in example 2.

In addition to "possession" for impossessable animates, using te, and
possession for inanimates, using -ev for owner and -eð for possession,
Taruven also has inalienable possession:

    the man's head

becomes

    man-ji-head

An inalienable possession of the head, like an eye, goes to the left:

    man-ji-head-ji-eye

But toss in something alienably possessed and it starts to get
complicated:

    man-ji-head-ji-eye_GEN+ color_GEN-

Affixes on a ji-construction affects only the head (the leftmost noun),
but the possessors in a ji-construction *can* carry their own
*suffixes*, but not their own *prefixes*, so:

    man_PL-ji-head = "the men's head"

This implies a shared head, which is generally not possible, so it acts
as a shorter form of the next:

    man_PL-ji-head_PL = "the men's heads" (one head per man)

But:

    0_man-ji-head

where 0 is zero number, means there were zero (or missing) heads, not
that there were zero (or missing) men.


t.