Re: Antigenetive case?

--- In conlang@y..., Joe <joe@W...> wrote:
> Has anyone thought of a case which marks a genetive, but marks it on the
> posessed, not the posessor? I'll make up an example --
>
> In a demo language (not existing)
> ie.
>  kathai elom
>  cat.AGN(f) 3s.ACC(m)
>  cat-of him
>   his cat
>
> AGN = anti genitive
> 3s = Third person singualr
> ACC =   Accusative.

How do you mark grammatical case on this phrase?  If you were to
say "His cat sees me" or "I see his cat" or "I give the cat some
food", you'd have to mark nominative, accusative and dative cases
on the phrase "his cat".  But the head noun (cat) already has a
case, your antigenitive.

Would you mark the global case on the describing word (in this example
"he")?  That sounds quite couterintuitive to me.  You could add
*both* case suffixes to the head noun, which is something I wouldn't
like either, but it might work for you.  Some real-life languages
stack cases IIRC.

However, if you use the classical genitive construction, you can
leave the head noun in its grammatical case and just tag the
describing word with the genitive: "I give cat:DAT he:GEN some food".

As for the name of antigenitive, it suggested something else to me
at first sight...  I would expect cat:AGN man to mean "the man who
possesses the cat" rather than "the cat possessed by the man".



-- Christian Thalmann

Replies