agreement conflict? (fwd)

[Edith A Moravcsik]

   ************************************************************************
			 Edith A. Moravcsik
			 Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics
			 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
		         Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413
                         USA

			 E-mail: edith at uwm.edu
		         Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/
				    (414) 332-0141 /home/
		         Fax: (414) 229-2741





					      	










---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1999 20:45:57 +0100
From: Marcel Erdal <erdal at em.uni-frankfurt.de>
To: Edith A Moravcsik <edith at CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: Re: agreement conflict?

Dear Edith,
Turkish IS able to do all this, with the 1st or 2nd person possessive suffix
cancelling the 3rd person if there is a conflict; two genitives are
prohibited, though, one of the two (the non-pronominal one) appearing in the
stem form. This may not be FULLY satisfactory in all cases, since the
syntactic relationship between this non-genitive posessor and the possessum is
not explicit, and ambiguous instances MAY occur occasionally.
With sincere regards,
Marcel Erdal

Edith A Moravcsik wrote:

> In Hungarian, there is no way to translate phrases like "my branch
> of the family" or "John's share of the estate" in a way that would
> be structurally analogous to English. The simplest way to express such
> meanings in Hung. would be by making the English _of_ phrase" into an
> adnominal modifier, such as "my family branch" or "John's estate share".
>
> This fact is striking all the more since either of the two
> genitives involved in the English phrase can be expressed as
> a genitive if only one of them occurs. Thus, one can
> say "my branch" and also "the family's branch"; but the two
> - "my" and "the family's" - cannot occur together.
>
> The reasons must be specific to a rule against two cooccurring genitives
> in particular. This is shown by the possibility of Hungarian
> constructions such as "this branch of the family". In this phrase,
> a determiner (a demonstrative) cooccurs with a genitive. Thus the
> problem is not that genitives cannot cooccur with other DETERMINERS: they
> can if the determiner is a demonstrative but not if it is another
> genitive.
>
> A possible reason why structural analogs of "my branch of the family"
> are ungrammatical in Hungarian is the following. In Hungarian,
> the possessum agrees with the possessor in person and number
> (literally: "my branch-my"). Thus, the problem may be that if phrases like
> "my branch of the family" were to be expressed with two genitives
> ("my" and "of the family" both taking a genitival form), the
> possessum - "branch" - would have to take two agreement markers - in
> reference to "I" and to "the family". The two markers would then be
> competing for the (presumably) single agreement marker slot on the
> possessum ("my branch-my-its of the family").
>
> A fact that makes this account less than fully convincing is that
> the double genitive construction is ungrammatical in Hungarian even
> if the two genitives are of the same person and number - such as
> in "John's branch of the family", with both "John" and "the family"
> being third person singular. If the conflict between the different
> person-number specifications of the possessors were the problem, one
> might expect that phrases involving the SAME person-number for the two
> genitives would be grammatical, with one agreement marker doing
> for both ("John's branch-3S of the family").
>
> My questions are these:
>     a/ What might be the real reason for the ungrammaticality
> of the "my/his branch of the family"-type phrases in Hungarian?
>     b/ How do other languages which have possessor-possessum agreement,
> such as Turkish, express such phrases?
>
> Edith Moravcsik
>
>    ************************************************************************
>                          Edith A. Moravcsik
>                          Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics
>                          University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
>                          Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413
>                          USA
>
>                          E-mail: edith at uwm.edu
>                          Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/
>                                     (414) 332-0141 /home/
>                          Fax: (414) 229-2741
>
>

--
Prof. Dr. Marcel Erdal
Dept. of Turcology,
FB 11, J.W.Goethe University,
D-60054 Frankfurt a.M.
Germany.
Tlf.: +49-69-79 82 28 58
Fax: +49-69-79 82 49 74