possessives

[Elena Maslova]

At 18:10 8/18/99 -0400, David Beck wrote:

> 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).

     In posing this question, you seem to be assuming that that
the distinction between "possession" and "nominal modifiers like
...." can be understood in a language-independent fashion - so
that for each language, it would be possible to answer whether or
not it expresses this distinction. Yet this is false.

    Imagine the following situation: a language has two different
constructions with a nominal head and a nominal dependent. It is
likely that these constructions also differ in meaning (in most
general sense): the difference may have to do with the ranges of
semantic relations covered (with possible overlaps),
definiteness, referentiality, plurality, alienability, nominal
classes, etc.

    Most of these parameters are in fact not unrelated to the
English distinction you are referring to. It would be however
difficult to say whether the language differentiates between
"possession" and "nominal modifiers like ..." - it does
differentiate between something and something, but whether this
is what you mean? - who knows (in fact, in a reference grammar
both constructions are likely to be called either "possessive" or
"genetive", or otherwise "constructions with nominal modifiers").


   Imagine now, a language has only one construction of this
kind. Does this mean that this language does not differentiate
between "possession" and "nominal modifiers like ..."? Again,
depends on what you mean. In a sense, yes: it has only a single
construction for what may be called nominal modifiers, and this
construction is likely to cover what may be called possession
*and* lots of other meanings which would depart more or less
significantly from "possession" in the strict sense and be more
or less "attributive". But what if this construction cannot be
applied to render attributive meanings like in "fire truck" or
"steak knife", i.e., such attributes (or some of them) are not
expressed by "nominal modifiers"? How should your question be
applied to such a language and what sort of answer do you expect
to find in a reference grammar?

Best,






Elena Maslova
University of Bielefeld

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