possessives

[David Beck]

Well, again I am overwhelmed by the responses to my inquiry about
possessives. I have to admit to being surprised that there are so many
langauges that use simple juxtaposition to mark possessive relations. This
actually might change the way I am thinking about a couple of things and
so, with professor Goldberg's permission, I would like to pose a couple of
questions about these languages:

If the language uses simple juxtaposition of two nouns to express
possessive relations,  does it differentiate possession from a)
attributives (nominal modifiers like fire truck or steak knife) and b)
adjectival modification (red truck, sharp knife). And if, so how?

This information is difficult to glean from many reference grammars (I
know, I've been looking for similar stuff in other langauge types for the
last year or so).

Cheers,

David

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David Beck
Programme in Linguistics
University of Michigan
105 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
USA
e-mail: (as of Sept. 7) dbeck at umich.edu
phone: (734) 978-4029