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Re: THEORY: genitive vs. construct case/izafe

From:Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
Date:Friday, July 22, 2005, 18:43
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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Julia "Schnecki" Simon <helicula@...>