possessive non-marking

[Johanna Nichols]

>Are there any languages that mark neither possessor nor possessee in a
>possessive construction? That is, does anybody say MANUEL FATHER to mean
>Manuel's father? (And languages that case-mark one of the NPs don't count.)
>
>David Beck

This is not uncommon, especially among languages with relatively simple
morphology. Sometimes possessive constructions of this type resemble (or
are) compounding.  A good source of information on different kinds of
possessive constructions is in the literature on alienable and inalienable
possession; try  Chapell & McGregor's The Grammar of Inalienability (Mouton
de Gruyter, ca. 1996).  An example from Kiowa is given in Nichols,
Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (Chicago, 1992), p. 118. (Kiowa is
not a morphologically simple language.)

Johanna Nichols

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Johanna Nichols
Professor
Department of Slavic Languages
Mailcode 2979
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Phone:	(1) (510) 642-1097 (direct)
	(1) (510) 642-2979 (messages)
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