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

David Gil gil at shh.mpg.de
Sun Feb 4 10:30:34 UTC 2018


Martin's latest message is helpful in clarifying the question.  And if I 
may add my two cents worth ...

On 04/02/2018 19:06, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
>
> 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.
>
Well in colloquial Malay/Indonesian, you can easily get structures such as

Aku jari kelingking sebelah kiri sakit
I [ [ finger pinky side left ] ache ]

and such structures are very common in western Indonesia and Mainland 
Southeast Asia.  The typical way of looking at them is as instances of

TOPIC [ SUBJECT PREDICATE ]

where the relationship of possession is just one possible outcome of a 
broader topic/comment relationship.  Of course, in the cases that I am 
most familiar with, at least, there's no evidence that the SUBJECT (be 
it simple or complex) cliticizes to the predicate.  But Martin, at 
least, would surely share my reluctance to define a construction type 
based on as elusive a property as wordhood.

I suspect, however, that constructions such as the above are not exactly 
what Alexey is looking for, which may be considered as reinforcing Borik 
and Gehrke's point cited above by Martin.

David


-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany

Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816

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