Re: Possession and genitivity

On Saturday, April 30, 2005, at 07:45 , Joseph Bridwell wrote:

>>> This is sometimes called the partitive or false possessive.
>>
>> I've always known it as the 'partitive' - at least for
>> the last 50+ years.
>
> Okay.
>
>> But "false possessive" seems a perverse term to me.
>
> Well, the term isn't mine -
I didn't assume it was - as you said "this is sometimes called", so I took
it you were just reporting a fact."

> I know several linguists who currently
> use it to describe this, and I've used it for the past 30. Perhaps
> it's but another case of some linguistic jargon being English-,
> German-, or Spanish-centric.
I've never heard the term before, and it still seems somewhat perverse to
me. Grammar terminology was, when I was in school in the 1950s, heavily
Latin-centric   :)

The tradition was to talk of different _functions_ of the accusative,
genitive, dative etc. Thus one had, for example:
genitive of possession
genitive of definition
partitive genitive
subjective genitive
objective genitive
etc.

When we were taught English grammar, the form denoted by 's was called
'possessive' and it was stressed that in English it did not have all the
uses of the Latin genitive.

The term 'false possessive' seems to imply "_of_ denotes possession" and
then to explain those occurrences of _of_ not denoting possession as
'false possession'; the tradition I was brought up with would not have
given a general function to "of" (or any other preposition), but rather to
label different functions.

Well, as you say - different traditions.

>
>> There are plenty of natlangs that simply do _not_
>> use the same construction for possession and
>> for the partitive.
>
> Yes, like Finnish. It has (to my memory) a partitive case.
It has. It also has, according to my information, a 'genitive-accusative'
which may denote either possession or the direct object.

> Also a
> number of aborigonal American languages.
>
>> One such language is spoken on this island - it's
>> called Welsh   :)
>
> Ah, yes - possession through nouns being juxtaposition. I believe
> Semitic languages do this too.
Yep - this is one of about half a dozen similarities between the Insular
Celtic langs & the Semitic langs that have led to several wild theories
:)

> And English, which uses "of" more often to mark false possessive and
> partitive, than to mark real possession.
I agree - which IMO makes it unhelpful to equate _of_ with possession
per_se. I am used to the tradition of naming constructs according to their
function.

> About a year ago Ms. Elgin
> and I spent about 5 days trying help some native speakers of English
> try to understand that "the collection of books" is not real
> possession while "the books of the collection" is.
	:)

If only those guys had spoken Welsh as well, you'd have done it in 5
seconds:
  y casgliad    o lyfrau
the collection of books  (partitive)

llyfrau'r casgliad
books  the collection = the books of the collection/ the collection's
books (possessive)

Ray
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