Re: adjectives

On Sun, Jan 14, 2001 at 10:53:16AM +0900, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> I keep getting screwed up on head- vs. (the other one--tail?)-marking
> languages in possessives.  If you said something like:
>
> Yoon's unicorn (yes, an old bad pun)
>
> would that be head-marking or other-marking?
[snip]

IIRC, head-marking means that when you have a word X that modifies a word
Y, the marking of that dependency is attached to Y. So, in your example,
the "head" is "unicorn", the tail is "Yoon" (no pun intended :-P). The
possessive mark "-s" is on the tail, so this is an example of
tail-marking.

[Disclaimer: I *could* be making an utter fool of myself here, having
formally not studied linguistics before :-) ]


T

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