query: animacy in NP-internal sociatives

[David Gil]

I am interested in references to, or comments on, NPs of the form "N 
with N".

Consider the contrast between (1) and (2)

(1 (a) A clown arrived at the party with a poodle
    (b) A clown arrived at the party with a basket full of goodies
(2)(a) # A poodle arrived at the party with a clown
     (b) # A basket full of goodies arrived at the party with a clown

As is well-known, the sentences in (2) are pragmatically odd because 
subjects tend to be higher on the animacy hierarchy than other 
positions, such as, in the above examples, sociatives (complements of 
"with").

What I'm interested in is the NP-internal analogues of the above.  
Imagine the following as, say, captions of a photograph:

(3)(a) A clown with a poodle
     (b) A clown with a basket full of goodies
(4)(a) # A poodle with a clown
     (b) # A basket of goodies with a clown

The judgements in (3) and (4) seem parallel to those in (1) and (2).

Can anybody point me to discussion in the literature of constructions 
such as those in (3) and (4), in English or in other languages?  Any 
other relevant comments would also be appreciated.

Two additional observations:

(I) For languages in which -- unlike English -- 'with' is identical to 
'and', and which are head-initial, the facts in (3) and (4) would fall 
out of the kinds of principles that govern the order of terms in 
conjunctions, such as Haj Ross' "me first" principle, which makes use of 
a variant of the animacy hierarchy.  But what about languages in which 
'with' is identical to 'and' but which are head-final (eg. Japanese, 
Mandarin): what are the judgements for the equivalents of (3) and (4)?

(II) Similar facts obtain with respect to other prepositions, such as 
those expressing spatial relations.  Note, however, that the correct 
generalization for NPs cannot be stated in terms of heads and 
attributes. eg. "heads tend to be higher on the animacy hierarchy than 
attributives", because this fails for genitives: as evident in (5) and 
(6), the preference is for the attributive possessor to be higher on the 
animacy hierarchy than the head possessed:

(5)(a) # A poodle's clown
     (b) # A basket full of goodies' clown
(6)(a) A clown's poodle
     (b) A clown's basket full of goodies

Thanks,

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 
Fax: 49-341-3550119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/