Creyeditor wrote: ↑04 Mar 2021 17:39
@sal: I really think it is important to distunguish semantic inalienability from morphosyntactic obligarory possession. Some languages just use different possessive constructions depending on alienability but still allow inalienable nouns without any possessor marking.
Fair point. However, I'm not really convinced!
If we're talking a direct/indirect possession distinction (on the basis of semantic inalienability), this is generally a fact about
the marking of possessors. But what Ahzoh is talking about is the marking of possessed status. The difference is that an inalienably possessed thing can have different possessors, so it makes sense to separate out the possessive markers from the root noun. But an inalienably possessed thing is never unpossessed (even if it's not morphologically marked). So how do you distinguish the morphemes, when the unpossessed form will never occur?
There would seem to be three possibilities:
a) the base and inflected forms both occur, because sometimes the noun is possessed and sometimes it isn't. But in this case, that's not something inalienably possessed - inalienable possession is inalienable, it cannot be taken away from the noun. You may still have a direct/indirect possession distinction, but it's no longer on the basis of semantic inalienability.
b) the base and inflected forms both occur, because even though the noun is always possessed, the different forms are used in different semantic or grammatical contexts (eg, the construct may not be used for the middle noun in an X-of-Y-of-Z chain). But in that case, the umlaut is not a marker of possession, but of whatever it is that the umlaut is actually marking!
c) only the inflected form occurs, because the inflection marks possession, and the possession is inalienable. In this case, there cannot (synchronically) be said to be umlaut at all, because there is no unumlauted form for comparison.
None of this is necessarily connected to the morphological obligatoriness of possessive morphemes. It is indeed possible to have a semantically inalienable noun that is not overtly marked for a specific possessor - because although the noun must be possessed, there need not be a marker for being possessed [so, for example, the marker may be dropped in certain grammatical or semantic situations, such as indefinite or topical possession]. But it's not possible to have a genuinely semantically inalienable noun explicitly marked as unpossessed, because an inalienable noun can never be unpossessed (even if you don't know the possessor or it's clear from context). There may be times when you
don't mark that it's possessed, but there shouldn't be times when you
mark that it's unpossessed, which is what the ruckumlaut here would do.
To give a concrete example: if
meme-mia is 'my mother', and
meme-tua is 'your mother', it makes sense that in some languages you may be able to say just
meme, meaning perhaps "somebody's mother" or "the mother we talked about" or the like. [whereas in a language with
obligatory possession, you couldn't say this, you'd have to say
*meme-qui, "unspecified person's mother" and so on]. But it doesn't make sense that you'd ever want to say
**mama and mean "a mother who is not the mother of anyone or anything". It cetainly doesn't make sense that this would be the basic form of the noun from which the other forms are derived.
I suppose you could argue: it's not inalienability, but it's a property connected to inalienability, so we'll just call it that for convenience. But at the very least, that should make clear why languages don't have more elaborate marking for possession of inalienables than of alienables: the marking of possession on an alienable is semantically double-marking - it marks that, unlike most things of this class, this item is actually possessed, and THEN it indexes the possessor. Whereas with an inalienable, the possession is inherently (lexically) marked, so the overt marking is just to index the possessor. Naturally, double marking is likely to be more marked than single marking!
Although, to answer my own confusion... I guess you could have a morphological marker on the noun, not to indicate possession, but to warn the speaker of the presence of a genitive modifier, and I guess that this is what Ahzoh is doing? In which case... OK. And sorry, I should have realised that. But in that case, I wouldn't worry too much about cross-linguistic marking of possession, since you're really talking here about marking of phrase edges, which is completely different (eg some languages with a construct state also use it to mark adjectives that precede their head, iirc). Since your construct state doesn't semantically alter possession, I wouldn't think that it should interfere too much with an inalienable possession system?
In terms of how you should do it... I guess it depends how your construct state developed. It's not usually something that's fundamentally marked, AIUI - construct state is essentially just a prohibition on the double-marking of definiteness, coupled in some languages with the absence of sound changes linked to edges and stress patterns. So how this would interact with possession would depend on the details of what markers there were, and which have been dropped.
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How I would probably do it....
Stage 1:
inalienables must have overt possession marking, in one of three ways:
a) possessive pronominal prefix - ma-mar, "my leg", tu-mar, "your leg"
b) an overt possessor - mar lago, "the idiot's leg"
c) an indefinite possessor suffix (originally a pronominal indefinite possessor, presumably) - mar-i, "someone's leg"
alienables are always marked with the b) construction
Stage 2:
The b) construction merges with the c) construction: mar-i lago:
- ma-mar, "my leg"; lon ma, "my shoe"
- mar-i lago, "the idiot's leg"; lon lago, "the idiot's shoe"
- mar-i, "someone's leg"; lon kon-ul, "someone's shoe"
Stage 3:
possession stops being obligatory; inalienables can now be marked instead with definite or indefinite markers, as can other nouns.
- mar-at, "the leg"; lon-at, "the shoe"
- mar-ul, "a leg"; lon-ul, "a shoe"
- ma-mar, "my leg"; lon-at ma, "the shoe of mine"
- mar-i-at lago-ul, "the leg of an idiot"; lon-at lago-ul, "the shoe of an idiot"
- mar-i, "someone's leg"; lon-at kon-ul, "the shoe of someone"
Stage 4:
construct state (no double-marking of definiteness):
- mar-at; lon-at
- mar-ul; lon-ul
- ma-mar; lon ma
- mar-i lago-ul; lon lago-ul
- mar-i; lon kon-ul
Stage 5: phrase-final vowels drop
- mar-at; lon-at
- mar-ul; lon-ul
- ma-mar; lonm
- mar-i lago-ul; lon lago-ul
- mar; lon kon-ul
Stage 6: umlaut, and epenthetic vowel
- mar-at; lon-at
- mar-ul; lon-ul
- ma-mar; lon-u-m
- mer-i lago-ul; lon lago-ul
- mar; lon kon-ul
Stage 7: word-final vowels drop.
This gives us two paradigms:
alienable nouns:
a shoe: lonat
the shoe: lonul
someone's shoe: lon konul
an idiot's shoe: lon lagol
my shoe: lonum
but inalienable nouns:
a leg: marat
the leg: marul
someone's leg: mar
an idiot's leg: mer lagol
my leg: mamar
A construct state, and umlaut only in the construct state of inalienable nouns. Plus a distinct paradigm for pronominal possession of inalienable nouns, which could be dropped for most nouns but retained for a small number of irregulars.
In any case, I'd definitely think about the general path of former obligatory possession, with an umlauting suffix as an indefinite possession marker that was then generalised in many cases. You could even generalise it to all instances of the noun, but have it dropped in phrase-edge conditions (i.e. only retained in the construct state).