Re: Genitive relationships (WAS: Construct States)

At 07:08 PM 3/9/99 -0800, JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:
>On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Tim Smith wrote:
>
>> Hwendaaru has a possessive construction modeled after that of Hindi/Urdu:
>> the possessor noun appears with the oblique case suffix, followed by a
>> possessive particle which agrees in definiteness, number, gender and case
>> with the possessed NP.  The default order is possessor-possessum
>> (head-final), but this order can be reversed if the possessor is contrastive
>> or otherwise emphatic.
>>
>> hantan tu klaathu = "the man's house" (def. nom. sg.)
>>
>> hant-a-          n   t-   u-           0   klaath-u-          0
>> man- Def:Sg:Anim-Obl Poss-Def:Sg:Inan- Nom house- Def:Sg:Inan-Nom
>
>Is this possessive particle used elsewhere in the grammar, or just
>in possessive constructions?  It reminds me of the 'linking morpheme'
>found in possessive constructions in many Bantu languages, except
>that the latter agrees with the possessor rather than the possessum.
>
>Matt.
>
Actually, "particle" was a bad choice of term.  I think it's really more
like a possessive adjective.  In fact, I think it can be used by itself as a
possessive adjective when the possessor is a third-person NP already present
in the discourse.  (Thus _tu klaathu_, without the preceding oblique NP,
would mean "his/her/its/their house".)  BTW, the stem is really only _t-_;
the vowel is the same definiteness/number/gender marker that's suffixed to
all nouns between the lexical stem and the case suffix (-a for definite
singular animate, -u for definite singular inanimate, -i for definite
plural, zero for indefinite (but an NP modified by ta/tu/ti is always
definite, so there's no need for a form _*t_ with no vowel, which wouldn't
be pronouncable anyway)).

But it also appears attached to first and second person pronouns as a sort
of possessive-adjective-forming suffix: _hwe_ ("I") ->
_hwenta/hwentu/hwenti_ ("my"), etc.  Either way, it agrees with the
possessed NP in gender, number and case, just like Indo-European possessive
adjectives.

In the Hindi construction that this is modeled after, Yamuna Kachru (in the
article on Hindi and Urdu in Comrie's _The World's Major Languages_) calls
the equivalent word a "possessive postposition", because it always comes
immediately after the oblique case of the possessor NP, and thus looks like
all the other postpositions except that it agrees in gender, number and case
with the possessed NP (which immediately follows it, as modified nouns
normally follow adjectives).  So it's really sort of a way of turning the
entire possessor NP into an adjective-like modifier of the possessed NP.

But Hindi is different in a couple of ways.  For one thing, Hindi only has
two cases, nominative and oblique (but the oblique is always followed by a
postposition, so the effect is the same as having lots of cases).  The
Hwendaaru "oblique" is not a true case; rather it's a morpheme that's
substituted for any non-core case suffix on any noun or adjective other than
the last in its NP. (Usually this means an adjective modifying a following
noun, but it's the noun when that precedes the adjective.)  I basically
introduced this rule to prevent NPs from getting too long, awkward and
repititious.  The core case suffixes (ergative, accusative and dative) add
at most one syllable to the word, and not even that when the noun is
definite (and the nominative has a zero suffix), but the non-core case
suffixes add at least one syllable and sometimes more.  For instance, "the
big house" is:

nominative:     tsaamu klaathu
accusative:     tsaamuk klaathuk
but inessive:   tsaamung klaathurelme, not *tsaamurelme klaathurelme

The oblique suffix is a nasal whose realization depends on the initial
phoneme of the following word.  For example, "in the man's house" is

hantan tung klaathurelme

hant-a-         -n   t-   u-         -ng  klaath-u-          relme
man- Def:Sg:Anim-Obl Poss-Def:Sg:Inan-Obl house- Def:Sg:Inan-Iness

Once I had that oblique suffix, I thought of using it with something like
the Hindi/Urdu "possessive postposition".

Another difference is that in Hwendaaru, unlike in Hindi and Urdu, the
possessor doesn't have to come before the possessum, although that's the
default order.  If the order is reversed, the _ta/tu/ti_ still follows the
possessor, e.g.:

hantan tu klaathu = "the man's house"
klaathu hantan tu = "the MAN'S house"

-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

Get your facts first and then you can distort them as you please.
- Mark Twain