LINGUIST List 6.666

Thu 11 May 1995

Misc: Possessives, Affricates, Greetings and Religion

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Chris Barker, Possessives: corrections
2. Szigetvari Peter, affricates
3. GUERSSEL MOHAMED, Greetings and religion (fwd)

In Jack Wiedrick's recent summary posting [6.596, Sum: Possessives],
his kind citing of my work contains a couple of inaccuracies which I
would like to correct: my PhD is not from UC San Diego, but rather
from UC Santa Cruz; my dissertation was not distrubted by the Ohio
State University (though OSU did generously provide funds for
distribution of copies), but it is under contract for publication by
CSLI in their dissertation series (and will appear fairly soon, I
hope); and my current affliliation is not with the psychology
department at the University of Rochester, but with Center for the
Sciences of Language (at UR).

I am sorry I missed the original post. I do have a recent manuscript
on exactly this topic, and in fact I was led onto the topic by John
Goldsmith's earlier posting to the linguist list. I agree with most
of Jack's insightful summary, and I believe that most or all of the
special properties of the so-called double genitive ("a friend of
Tom's") that he notes are nicely accounted for by Jackendoff's (1968)
hypothesis that this is a partitive construction. This position is
defended in detail in my draft, which is availble in a variety of
formats by anonymous ftp at the following location:

ftp://ling.rochester.edu/pub/barker/Papers/Partitives/barker.double.genitives*

A couple of the more notable additional references (extracted from the
bibliography in my draft) are:

Altenberg, Bengt (1982) {\it The Genitive v.~the \r{of}-Construction:
a Study of Syntactic Variation in 17th Century English},
Lund Studies in English 62, CWK Gleerup [LiberF\"orlag Lund], Malm\"o.

Dean, Janet (1966) `Determiners and Relative Clauses', unpublished
manuscript, MIT.

Jackendoff, Ray (1968b), `Possessives in English', in Anderson,
Jackendoff, and Keyser, {\it Studies in Transformational Grammar and
Related Topics}, AFCRL-68-0032, 25--51. A substantially revised
version has been translated into French by Edmond Grimberg (1969) `Les
constructions possessives en anglais', {\it Langages\/} {\bf
14.1}:7--27.

Narita, Hajime (1986) `The nature of the double genitive',
{\it Descriptive and Applied Linguistics\/} {\bf 19}: 193--206.
Published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, International
Christian University, Tokyo.

Stockwell, Schachter and Partee (1973),
{\it The Major Syntactic Structures of English},
Holt, Rinehart, Winston, New York. (See pages 122ff, 708)

Sweet, Henry (1898) {\it A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical},
Clarendon, Oxford. (See page 54)

 -- Chris Barker (barkerling.rochester.edu)

Marc Picard (PICARDVAX2.CONCORDIA.CA) writes (LingList: Vol-6-610):

)I'm also extremely
)suspicious of any purported difference between [t+S]/[tS] in any language.

Hungarian is a language where there is such a difference: /t+S/ clusters
surface as geminate affricates [ttS], /tS/ is [tS] on the surface, e.g.

h\'ats\'o /ha:t+So:/ -) [hattSo:] `back (adj.>' vs.
l\'acs\'o /la:tSo:/ -) [la:tSo:] `good (slang>'.

[Also notice closed syllable shortening in the first case.]

P\'eter Szigetv\'ari
Dept of Eng Ling
E\"otv\"os Lor\'and Univ
Budapest, Hungary
szigetvaosiris.elte.hu

 Re greetings, Arabic, Islam, and so on, it is true that greeting formulas
in Moslem socities where Arabic is not the native language are strongly
influenced by Arabic. There is to my knowledge one outstanding exception:
The Berber society of the Sahel, better known as the Tuareg. There are
three main varieties of Berber spoken in that part of the world:
Tamasheqq (mainly in Mali), Temazheght (mainly in Niger), and a smaller
group, Tamahaqq (mainly in southern Algeria). I am not sure about
Tamasheqq and Tamahaqq, but greetings in Temazheght are almost entirely,
if not exclusively native to Berber, in a society which is perhaps
entirely moslem. Another remarkable feature is the absence of the name
Allah, outside of prayers which are original renditions of verses of the
Koran. The word for God in Temazheght is Messi 'my lord, my master' or
Messenegh 'our lord, our master', a root found in the Latin version
of the name of the Berber king Massinissa ( 200 B.C.)

Guerssel.mohameduqam.ca