Re: Colloquial German, experiencers and the construct state

On 8/14/05, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> 
> 
> Wait, it is not. It is similar to construct state, since the head is
> marked, but actually, an additional possessive pronoun is very common
> in these constructions. (As Schnecki said, Hungarian and Turkish have
> this. I suspect Finnish, too. And some langs *only* use a possessive
> pronoun (Moro? I don't recall).)

To choose a few at random, all the Mayan languages, the Totonac-Tepehuan 
languages, the Nahua languages iirc, and probably most of the other 
languages in the Mayan sprachbund depend on possessive prefixes almost 
excluslively. Mayan languages, in particular, are the most obsessively 
possessive-marking languages I've ever come across.

This is also quite common in Oceanic languages. Where else? Plenty of 
places, although I can't think of any other major ones off the top of my 
head. I think it can be found in Ge-Pano-Carib languages, and one of 
Elamite's possessive constructions worked this way. There's very often a lot 
of this in verb-initial languages, so that's probably the place to start if 
anyone's looking. (This isn't an accident, of course; it's more likely for a 
head-adjunct order language to mark heads and an adjunct-head one to mark 
adjuncts (dependents).)

The specific pattern "construct state" is mostly the preserve of the 
Afroasiatic languages. I'm going to go along with Henrik and say that unless 
there's a morphological distinction in the noun, it isn't state. (I suppose 
we could say that there is so such thing as state even when it's not 
morphologically marked, like we sometimes talk of "nominative case" in an 
analytic language that uses word order rather than case marking... but that 
would be a very unusual usage. How would you prove it was there?)

-- 
Patrick Littell
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