Re: Gender as suffixaufnahme?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...>
Date: 22-Feb-2007 16:42
Subject: Re: Gender as suffixaufnahme?
To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>

Hi Eugene

On 22/02/07, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> For example, "la vie" (the life, f.) doesn't become "le vie du garçon"
> (the life of the boy, m.).
>
> Eugene

I knew I had read about something similar and here it is:

Corbett (2006) points out:

"In familiar European languages body parts have a gender unaffected by the
'possessor'. Thus Russian /nos/ 'nose' takes masculine agreements,
irrespective of whose nose is intended... However, in Nungali (an Australian
language of the upper Daly River area, related to Jaminung) there is an
interesting construction restricted to possessed body parts, in which a noun
denoting the body part agrees in gender with the noun denoting the
possessor:

"Nungali (Bolt, Hoddinott & Kofod 1970, analysed in Evans 1994)

(52)*         ni-ya-manga   d-uNunin 1
                IV-I-ear           I-man
                (the man's ear)

"Here the gender IV noun for 'ear' has a gender I marker to show agreement
with d-uNunin 'man'. Note [further] that the overt marker of the noun's
lexical gender (IV) appears outside the agreement gender, a curious pattern
found because the marking of the agreement gender appears to have arisen
earlier."

Corbett goes on to state that adjectives take the inherent gender of the
noun denoting the body part, but notes that in addition to the "inherent"
gender of the body-part noun (BPN) itself, the body part noun takes an
additional prefix in concord with the possessor (whether implicit or
explicit):

"(54)*          mi-nad   mi-ya-Nargin 1
                 III-big     III-I-eye
                 'big eye (of a man)'

"(55)*          mi-nad   mi-na-Nargin   1
                 III-big     III-II-eye
                 'big eye (of a woman)'"

Furthermore, Corbett states that in Lak, the allative marker is added to the
lative marker, and also brings an "agreement slot":

"Lak (Kibrik 1979: 76)

(56) Qat-lu-wu-m-aj 2

house-OBL-IN-LAT-III-ALL

'into the house'

"In this example, the -m- is a gender III singular marker for agreement; the
controller will be a noun phrase in the absolutive."

* These numbers are used for reference by Corbett and are reproduced here
only as part of the quotation

1 The phoneme represented here by N is the velar nasal, represented by the
symbol conventionally called "eng" in the IPA. Corbett uses the eng itself.

2 The phoneme represented here by Q is an intensive uvular consonant,
represented by 'q' with a macron in the quoted material.

Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics),
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Bolt, Janet E.; Hoddinott, William C. & Kofod, Frances M. 1970. An
elementary grammar of the Nungali language. Unpublished manuscript, held at
AIATSIS, Canberra, quoted in Corbett (2006)

Kibrik, Aleksandr E. 1972. O formal'nom vydelenii soglasovatel'nyx klassov v
archinskom jazyke. 'Voprosy jazykoznanuja 1.124-31. Quoted in Corbett (2006)

Jeff



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