Re: Possession and genitivity

> > 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 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.

> 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. 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.

And English, which uses "of" more often to mark false possessive and
partitive, than to mark real possession. 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.

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