Re: adjectives

-----Original Message-----
From: Marcus Smith <smithma@...>
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU <CONLANG@...>
Date: Sunday, January 14, 2001 10:38 AM
Subject: adjectives


>Given the recent discussion of whether Chinese "adjectives" are stative
>verbs or not, I thought I would summarize a discussion on the matter by R.
>Dixon in "The Rise and Fall of Languages".
[lots of snippage]
Fascinating!  Now, a dumb question from you-know-who...

>There is a strong statistical correlation between
>head-marking/dependant-marking and which subclass of open adjectives a
>language has.
>
>I) Head-marking languages tend to have type (b) adjectives
>II) Dependent-marking languages tend to have type (a) adjectives
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?

In other words, does head-marking wrt possessives mean the owner or the
owned (well, yes, there *are* other uses of the possessive, but for
simplicity...) is marked?  I was reading about this in _Describing
Morphosyntax_ and for some reason the explanation therein just confused me.
:-/

YHL