co-possession (fwd)

[Edith A Moravcsik]

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			 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: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 00:09:39 +0300
From: "Arsenij Roginskij (or possibly Michael Daniel)" <aroginskii at isf.ru>
To: Edith A Moravcsik <edith at CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: Re: co-possession

Dear Colleagues!

In the letter from D.N.S. Bhat another example of language is provided
where two NPs may be dominated by the same head NP. I quote:

(1b)    nann-a maney-a   nann-a bha:ga
        my-Gen house-Gen my-Gen part
        'my part of my house (co-possession)'

I want to underline that Kannada, according to the letter, dispose of
only one noun-to-noun relation marker, and that again the dominated
personal pronoun is situated closer to the head noun; this is thus
exactly the case of Spanish as described in the letter from A. King
where only de-construction exists to express noun-to-noun relation (for
full NPs) and where non-hierarchical interpretation is available for (a)
rather than for (b):
(a) la parte de Juan de la casa
(b) la parte de la casa de Juan
because in (a) 'Juan' can not possibly dominate 'de la casa' and
consequently does not generate an alternative NP-parsing.
The examples from Kannada thus support the suggestion of ambiguity
avoidance mechanism (see the last summary).
In connection to this I would like to ask if Kannada provides
non-hierarchical interpretation also for:
(c) nann-a maney-a bha:ga
    'my part of the house' ?
and
(d) nann-a idu maney-a bha:ga
    I-gen this house-gen part
    'my part of this house'
These questions go to D.N.S. Bhat.

I also want to underline that the term "co-possession", although very
handy, shifts the accent from the formal point of view to the semantic
one. This seems to me misleading. The term "co-possession" may as well
be applied to such phrases as "the king and queen's palace" (as the
letter about Kannada does in example (2)) while they are irrelevant to
our present discussion. Something like "co-attributive constructions"
would be more precise, even if not that good-looking.

Michael Daniel