[Lingtyp] Is there 'Raising' triggered by pseudo noun incorporation?

Sun Feb 4 10:06:39 UTC 2018

“Possessor raising” is a term that was used widely in the 1970s and 
1980s for construction pairs like the following:

[My head] aches. <–> I ache @head.

You washed [my feet]. <–> You washed me @feet.

In Relational Grammar (RG), this came to be called “possessor ascension” 
in more technical parlance (Blake 1990: 79-83), and the idea was that in 
the construction with a raised possessor, the possessor occupies the 
syntactic role that the possessed noun has in the construction with 
adnominal possessor. So this is different from the French construction 
“Tu m’as lavé les pieds”, where the external possessor is a kind of 
“dative argument”. Since 1999 (Payne & Barshi (eds.)), all these 
constructions have sometimes come to be subsumed under the heading 
“external possessor constructions”.

I’m not aware of any large-scale cross-linguistic studies of such 
constructions – most of the works dealing with them seem to be about 
particular languages (König & Haspelmath (1998) deal with a lot of 
languages, but primarily European languages of the French type). So this 
is still a desideratum in typology.

Now what is the role of the possessed noun (@head, @feet) in the raised 
construction? It seems that it can have all kinds of different 
properties. In RG, it was called “demoted” (or “chômeur”), and in some 
languages, it is strictly adjacent to the verb stem and called 
“incorporated”. Then it looks like this, schematically:

I head-ache.

You feet-washed me.

Father knife-sharpened the neighbor. (Alexey (“Lesha”) Vinyar’s Chukchi 
example)

Now Alexey Vinyar’s question is whether one gets this sort of pattern 
also with pseudo-incorporation (PNI), where the possessed noun is still 
strictly adjacent, but a complete noun phrase can occur in this position 
(not just a noun stem). So this would be something like

You [@dirty feet]-washed me.

Father sharpened-[@dull knife] the neighbor.

I don’t know of any cases, but I’m not sure whether PNI is a 
particularly useful notion to begin with. As seen nicely in Borik & 
Gehrke’s (2015) book, there are a wide range of related constructions 
with some family resemblances but apparently little overall coherence.

One interesting observation that was made in the 1980s is that even the 
possessed nouns in French-type “raising-to-dative” constructions show 
some restrictions, e.g. in that they cannot take nonrestrictive modifiers:

Tu m’as lavé les pieds. (“You washed-me the feet”)

*Tu m’as lavé les pieds sales. (“You washed-me the dirty feet”)

(See König & Haspelmath 1998: §2.4.) They may also be restricted in that 
they must be definite (He hit me on the arm/?He hit me on an arm), and 
in that they must be verb-adjacent:

German

Du hast deinem Kind oft die Füße gewaschen. (“You often washed your 
child the feet”)

?Du hast deinem Kind die Füße oft gewaschen.

Best,

Martin

*******

References

Blake, Barry J. 1990. /Relational grammar/. London: Routledge.

Borik, Olga & Berit Gehrke. 2015. /The syntax and semantics of 
pseudo-incorporation/. Leiden: Brill.

König, Ekkehard & Martin Haspelmath. 1998. Les constructions à 
possesseur externe dans les langues d’Europe. In Jack Feuillet (ed.), 
/Actance et valence dans les langues de l’Europe/, 525–606. Berlin: 
Mouton de Gruyter (https://zenodo.org/record/1165254)

Payne, Doris L. & Immanuel Barshi (eds.). 1999. /External possession/. 
Amsterdam: Benjamins.

On 02.02.18 19:54, Алексей Виняр wrote:
> Dear colleagues!
>
> I would like to ask you a question about pseudo noun incorporation ((), like described in [Massam 2001, 2009]) and 'raising' ((), see [Mithun 1984: 856-859]). Unfortunately, before asking the question I need a long introduction to define how I understand these notions (sorry about that).
>
> (1) P(seudo) N(oun) I(ncorporation)
>
> ne    [kai  sipi    mo         e       ika   mitaka] a       Sione
> PST [eat  chip  COMTV ABS  fish  good]    ABS  SIone
> 'Sione ate good fish and chips'. (Niuean, [Massam 2001: 160])
>
> (2) NI with 'raising'
>
> a. ətɬəɣ-e         waɬə-∅             pəne-nin                    enaraɬʔ-etə
>      father-ERG  knife-ABS.SG  sharpen-3sgA/3sgO  neighbour-DAT
> b. ətɬəɣ-e         waɬa-mna-ne-n                   enaraɬʔə-n
>      father-ERG  knife-sharpen-3sgA/3sgO  neighbour-ABS.SG
>      'Father sharpened a/the knife for the neighbour'. (Chukchi, personal fieldnotes)
>
> As I know, there are many definitions of both NI and PNI (see, for example [Massam 2009], [Borik & Gehrke 2015] and [Johns 2017]), but let's say that PNI is a construction where the object phrase is inseparable from the verb and the head of this object phrase takes no inflection, but doesn't exhibit any phonological cohesion with the verb. As was noted by Diane Massam, pseudo-incorporated objects can be phrasal (see (1), for example).
>
> There are also various approaches to 'raising', but let's stick with the definition given by [Mithun 1984: 856-859]: a construction, in which another participant can take the object position vacated by an incorporated nominal.
>
> I am not an expert in PNI, but, according to my knowledge, there is no language where PNI can trigger 'raising'. So, MY QUESTION IS: do you know any languages where PNI can trigger any kind of 'raising'?
>
> Note: I know that the notions like 'phonological cohesion', 'word' are problematic ([Haspelmath 2011]), and so NI is problematic, too ([Haspelmath 2012]). So, for current purposes let's say that the only difference between NI and PNI is that in PNI construction the whole noun phrase (where the modifiers of the uninflected head noun can bear their own inflection) can enter in the verbal complex.
>
> Looking forward to hear your comments and insights (and thank you for your attention)!
>
> Best wishes,
> Lesha Vinyar, NRU HSE, Moscow
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-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10	
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig

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