Re: LC-01 genitive noun phrases
| From: | Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, October 28, 2003, 5:23 |
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On 28 Oct 2003 at 0:09, Tim May wrote:
> One possible way of avoiding the ambiguity would be to express "his
> black cat" as _ngakang skalat_, (something like "the cat, his black
> one"). This seems a little strange to me - does anyone know whether
> similar formations are ever found in natlangs? If it is acceptable,
> should "my black cat" then be _ngakang xkalat_, even though _xngakang
> kalat_ is unambiguous?
I don't see what's so wrong about it. English says "His black cat"
and not *"The black his cat". Okay, so you can draw bifurcations
above the sentence and show why that's right, but you could equally
draw the same kind of lines above the "wrong" one, especially, if the
question originally posed was "which of his cats?" rather than "which
cat?"
Paul