Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Detail #10: Impermissible possession

Some languages have nouns that mandatorily have to be possessed. These often include body parts, family relations, and so on. How about nouns that cannot be marked as possessed using any nominal marking, but possessing them is possible by some uses of verbal voice, such as having the possessor be the causative subject, or the dative of a transitive verb, or even have the possessed subject demoted to object of an otherwise intransitive verb?

The language could even permit several of these periphrastic constructions and assign them to different registers or encode information about social status and deference in them.

Marking a permissibly possessed noun by any of these would be highly marked, and could indicate both disowning, distance or respect, depending on which construction is used.

I envision something along this table:

possessor <-> possessum
causative subject <-> the actor instigated to act on something (with transitive verbs that have been made causative)
subject of intr. verb <-> object of intr. verb (basically; there may be transitivizing morphology on the verb; still, the object is not properly or even syntactically an object in the language, as it should fail some syntactical as well as possibly other objecthood tests)
indirect object <-> subject (with both intransitive and transitive verbs)
oblique comitative* <-> causative subject
oblique comitative* <-> any non-subject


* in case the language has several different comitatives, the "most oblique" one, for some arbitrary measurement of obliqueness.

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