Re: THEORY: genitive vs. construct case/izafe

Oops, sent to Julia instead of the list.

On 7/22/05, Julia Schnecki Simon <helicula@...> wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> 
> While designing a case system for my (still unnamed) conlang project,
> I started wondering about some terminology. You see, I'd really like
> to have izafe (construct case/construct case constructions/whatever), 
> but I'm not sure about the difference between genitive case and
> construct case.

The term most used is "state". The dependent nouns get case, whereas the 
head noun gets state. 

This also helps disambiguate when there're a case and a state with the same 
name, like "absolutive". (When a noun is not possessed in a language with 
morphological state, it gets the "absolutive state" in some terminologies. 
This is what it's called for Nahuatl, for example, or Tzeltal.)


> In a noun-noun (or noun-pronoun) construction that indicates
> possession or affiliation, if the possessor is marked, its form is 
> called "genitive", and if the possessed is marked, its form is
> called "construct". A construction of this type where the possessed
> is marked is called "izafe", even if the possessor is marked as 
> well. If only the possessor is marked, the construction is called
> "genitive phrase".
> 
> Does this sound about right?

I would use the term "genitive phrase" for all these constructions, whether 
or not there is a morphological genitive case.

 Turkish _ev_ "house", _kapI_ "door", _ev kapIsI_ "front door" 
> (generic term; a specific front door, i.e. the front door of a
> specific house, is _evin kapIsI_ with _ev_ in genitive case;
> _-(s)I_ is the 3sg possessive marker, so _ev(in) kapIsI_
> literally means "(of-)house its-door") 
> 
> Hungarian _fiú_ "boy", _könyv_ "book", _a fiú könyve_ "the boy's
> book" (with _könyv_ bearing the 3sg possessive marker _-e_, so a
> literal translation would be "the boy his-book") (Note that there 
> is no genitive case in Hungarian AFAIK.)

Incidentally, you can find this sort of thing in earlier stages of written 
English:

The daulphin of France his power
Juno hir bedde.

It's possibly a re-analysis of the genitive 's as "his".

> Could these constructions be called izafe? If not, what should I call
> them?

I sometimes use the term "construct state" to describe these, but I don't 
think it's entirely correct. The best term is probably something like 
"head-marked genitive phrase", or, in the case of Turkish, "double-marked".

The easiest way to think about it is with a four way typology of genitive 
marking: "head-marked (state)", "dependent-marked (case)", "double-marked 
(both)", unmarked (neither)". This will handle a vast majority of the 
constructions one will come across, although it fails to really capture 
rarer constructions like Suffixaufnahme, and can't really handle something 
like Maasai at all.

I know that the term "izafe" isn't normally used when talking about
> Hungarian, for example, but I'd like to find out if that's because 
> this Hungarian construction really has nothing to do with izafe, or
> because the people who study Finno-Ugrian languages usually aren't
> Semiticists and therefore don't know the term. ;-)

It's related; idafa constructions are a specific sort of the wider 
phenomenon of head-marking nominal phrases. Specifically, the sort in which 
the head marking doesn't exhibit agreement with the dependent. 

And what about languages where the possessor-possessed relationship is
> expressed simply by juxtaposing two nouns, or a noun and a pronoun, 
> without any case markings ("of-Peter book"), possessor affixes ("Peter
> his-book"), connecting particles (like Mandarin _de_), or similar?
> What do we call that kind of construction?

Simple juxtaposition is the unmarked sort, but I'm not sure about connecting 
particles. I would usually analyze these as dependent marking, depending on 
the syntax of the language in question. "Of the people" is a grammatical 
utterance, "book of" is not. But sometimes a linking particle is clearly 
neither a head modifier or a dependent modifier. In Maasai, for example, the 
linking particle must exhibit gender agreement with both the possessor and 
the possessed!

I hope someone here can help me...
> 
> Regards,
> Julia
> 
> --
> Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst 
> _@" schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com "@_
> si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
> (M. Tullius Cicero)
> 
-- 
Patrick Littell
PHIL205: MWF 2:00-3:00, M 6:00-9:00
Voice Mail: ext 744
Spring 05 Office Hours: M 3:00-6:00

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