Re: Possession (was: Re: Ergative)

At 12:03 AM 10/21/98 -0700, Matt Pearson wrote:
>Use of BE + a dative or locative expression to denote "have" is quite
>common.  Both Russian and Hindi express "I have a book" as "a book is
>beside me".  I think the Celtic languages do this as well.  So do
>Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish.
>
>What's less common, I think, is having both a BE + dative/locative and
>a HAVE construction in the same language (as in Latin and French).
>
Actually, English has a similar pair of constructions, except that where
many other languages use a dative or locative NP, English uses a genitive
("the book is John's").  My Latin is pretty rusty, but I seem to remember
that the difference in function between the construction with _habere_ and
an accusative object, vs. the construction with _esse_ and a dative
predicate, pretty closely parallels the difference in English between "John
has a/the book" and "the book is John's" -- in other words, it's a matter of
which is the topic: the possessor or the possessum.  But the Latin genitive,
unlike the English genitive, can only be a modifier, subordinate to another
NP; in other words, it can only be an attribute, never a predicate.
Therefore if you translated "the book is Mark's" literally into Latin
("liber Marci est"), it could only mean "it's Mark's book"; to convey the
meaning "the book is Mark's", you'd have to use the dative instead of the
genitive: "liber Marco est" (literally "the book is to/for Mark").  (I
changed possessor names in mid-example because I realized I don't know how
to decline "Johannes".)  "Marcus librum habet", on the other hand, has
exactly the same meaning as its literal English translation: "Mark has a/the
book".  In both English and Latin, what's basically happening is a
playing-out of the general cross-linguistic tendency to make topic identical
with subject whenever possible (a tendency which is arguably taken to its
logical extreme in trigger languages like Tagalog and Malagasy, or
(ob-conlang) my own newly revived Hwendaaru).
-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
-- The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939)