FW: Fw: Possession/modification by simple juxtaposition

[Hewitt, Stephen]

Absolutely, and even in spoken Arabic, there is a clear distinction between:
 
sayyâra    jamîla
car.F         beautiful.F
"a beautiful car"
 
and
 
sayyârat    Jamîla
car.F.CS    Jamila.F
"Jamîla's car"
 
Feminine singular nouns have a distinct construct state (CS) marker -at rather than simple feminine -a.
 
Best,
 
Steve Hewitt
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG]On Behalf Of Eitan Grossman
Sent: 21 November 2008 15:16
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: Re: Fw: Possession/modification by simple juxtaposition


I would like to respectfully disagree with Raffaele Simone. The Arabic annexation construction, at least in Classical Arabic, is rather unlike juxtaposition: apart from some few exceptions, both head and dependent are marked formally, the former by the absence of nunation, the latter by the genitive case. For a full exposition of this in the Semitic languages in general, one might look at G. Goldenberg's "Attribution in the Semitic Languages" (Langues orientales anciennes: philologie et linguistique 5-6, 1995: 1-20, reprinted in Studies in Semitic Linguistics). 

Best,
Eitan Grossman



On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Raffaele Simone < simone at uniroma3.it> wrote:


 
In Old French, Old Spanish and, to a lesser extent, in Old Italian, the requested structures were widespread in texts. Today their traces are in toponomastics and in some expressions:
 
Old French
Bourg-la-Reine (< Bourg de la reine)
Ho^tel-Dieu (< Ho^tel de Dieu)
la part-Dieu (< la part de Dieu)
Pont-l'Eve^que (< pont de l'éve^que)
la Dieu merci (< merci de Dieu)
la Complainte Rutebeuf
etc.
 
Old Spanish
Puenterrey (<Puente el rey)
Puente la reina
etc.
 
Old Italian
la Dio mercé (<la mercé di Dio)
 
Moreover, the Arabic construction called status constructus behaves more or less the same way.
Best,
R Simone
 
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Spencer, Andrew J" < spena at ESSEX.AC.UK>
To: < LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 12:02 PM
Subject: Possession/modification by simple juxtaposition

> We are interested in finding languages that express possession and adjectival modification in the same way, namely, by means of pure juxtaposition, without any other morphosyntactic marking (agreement, adpositions, case marking etc.). In other words, we're looking for languages with the following construction types (head-initial/head-final; the linear order doesn't matter to us and the language doesn't have to have a consistent head position):
> 
> good book:             book good // good book
> the name of (the) boy: name [(the) boy] // (the) boy name
> Gwen's book/mother:    book/mother Gwen// Gwen book/mother
> 
> A language which is close to what we're looking for is Spoken Welsh (head-initial):
> 
> good book:
> llyfr   da     
> book    good   
>                       
> the name of the boy:
> enw   y    bachgen
> name  the  boy
> 
> the name of a boy:
> enw    bachgen
> name   boy
>                       
> Gwen's book:   llyfr Gwen   
> Gwen's mother: mam Gwen   
> 
> However, in Welsh, adjectives take the soft mutation when they modify FEM.SG nouns, so this isn't a 'pure' example of the language type we're looking for.
> 
> If you know of a language with these properties please contact Andrew Spencer: spena at essex.ac.uk.
> We'll put together a synopsis of the replies. (You don't need to reply to the whole list.)
> 
> Andrew Spencer, University of Essex
> Irina Nikolaeva, School of Oriental and African Studies
> 

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