Re: Genitive relationships (WAS: Construct States)

FFlores wrote:

> Also, how do you indicate genitival relationships
> in your conlangs? Myself, I tend to use the good ol'
> genitive case, but in Ciravesu I simply resorted
> to juxtaposition (head-final).
Tokana makes use of juxtaposition to form compounds,
which are head-initial (opposite of English):

    suhu heut
    wind north        "north wind"

Compounds are extremely common in Tokana, given the
absence of any morphosyntactically distinct classes of
noun modifiers in the language.  Note that:

(1) Numbers and many quantifiers are nouns in Tokana,
so quantified noun phrases have the form of compounds,
where the quantifier/number is the head noun and the
lexical noun is the 'modifier':

    ante halma
    many book         "many books"

    hen halma
    two book          "two books"

You can tell that these are compounds because of where
case suffixes go.  There's a general rule in compounds
that the head noun hosts the case suffix while the
modifying noun remains unmarked:

    suhu heut
    wind north        "north wind"

    suhoi    heut
    wind-Dat north    "to/at (the) north wind"

    suhune    heut
    wind-Inst north   "with (the) north wind"

In quantifier phrases, the case suffix attaches to the
quantifier, while the lexical noun remains bare:

    ante'    halma
    many-Dat book     "to/in many books"

    anteu    halma
    many-Abl book     "from many books"

(2) Tokana does not have modifying adjectives.  Instead
adjective-like modification is done by means of compounding
a deverbal stative noun with a regular noun.  Deverbal
stative nouns are formed from stative verbs by suffixation:

    elifa        "be beautiful" (verb)
    elifi        "(that) which is beautiful" (noun)

    katia elifi
    house beautiful-one
    "beautiful house"

"Katia elifi" is literally something like "beautiful-one
house".

In terms of genitive relationships, Tokana works very much
like one of its models, namely Malagasy:  Pronominal possessors
are suffixed to the noun:

    te katia        "the house"
    te katiama      "my house"
    te katiako      "our house"
    te katiasa      "their house"

    ten katia       "the houses"
    ten katiakma    "our houses"
    ten katiasa     "their houses"

When the possessor is a full noun phrase, that noun phrase
immediately follows the possessed noun, and its determiner
is suffixed to the possessed noun (I give some examples below).

For those of you who don't know, Tokana possesses a class of
items which are used both as pronouns and as definite
articles or demonstratives.  For example, "ne" - in its
various forms - may be used by itself as a third person
animate singular pronoun, or it may be used as an animate
singular determiner when followed by a noun.  Thus we get pairs
like:

    ne       "he/she"
    ne iha   "the/that woman"

    se       "they (animate)"
    se iha   "the/those women"

The form of the suffixed determiner/pronoun in genitive
constructions is the same whether or not it is followed by
a noun.  So we get contrasts like:

    te katiana        "his/her house"
    te katiana iha    "the woman's house"
             (lit. "the house-the woman" or "the house-her woman")

    ten katiasa        "their houses"
    ten katiasa iha    "the women's houses"

And so on...

Matt.