Case and Grammatical Relations Across Languages: The Genitive

366 Pages·2013·1.44 MB·English

by  Anne Carlier

Case and
grammatical relations
across languages
THE GENITIVE
edited by
Anne Carlier and
Jean-Christophe Verstraete
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
The Genitive
Case and Grammatical Relations
Across Languages (CAGRAL)
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/cagral
Volume 5
The Genitive
Edited by Anne Carlier and Jean-Christophe Verstraete
The Genitive
Edited by
Anne Carlier
University of Lille 3, CNRS UMR 8163 STL
Jean-Christophe Verstraete
University of Leuven
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The genitive / Edited by Anne Carlier and Jean-Christophe Verstraete.
p. cm. (Case and Grammatical Relations Across Languages ; v. 5)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Possessives. 2. Grammar, Comparative and
general--Syntax. 3. Language and languages--Word formation. 4. Case
grammar. I. Carlier, Anne, editor of compilation.
P299.P67G46 2013
415’.5--dc23 2013010429
isbn 978 90 272 2815 4 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 9105 9 (Eb)
© 2013 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Acknowledgements vii
Genitive case and genitive constructions: An introduction 1
Anne Carlier and Jean-Christophe Verstraete
part 1. General surveys
The genitive case and the possessive construction in Finnish 19
Marc-Antoine Mahieu
The Russian genitive within the NP and the VP 5 5
Marleen Van Peteghem and Katia Paykin
Nominal and pronominal possessors in Romanian 105
Ion Giurgea and Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin
De: A genitive marker in French? Its grammaticalization path
from Latin to French 141
Anne Carlier, Michèle Goyens and Béatrice Lamiroy
The Bantu connective construction 217
Mark Van de Velde
part 2. Case studies
Word order restrictions in adnominal constructions. The case of the German
pre- versus postnominal genitive 255
Petra Campe
Tracing the origins of the Swedish group genitive 299
Muriel Norde
Floating genitives and possessive framing in Northern Akhvakh 333
Denis Creissels
Index 355

Acknowledgements
This volume is the fifth in the series Case and Grammatical Relations Across Languages,
initiated by the late Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn and linked with the project ‘Case and the-
matic relations’ (IUAP grant no 27). Neither of us was associated with the original
project, but when we were asked to step in for this volume, we tried to develop it in the
same spirit, combined with our own interests in diachrony and typology.
We would like to express our gratitude to a number of people. First of all, we thank
the authors, who contributed and reviewed papers and, in the case of early submitters,
had the patience to see them through to publication. All papers considered for the
volume were reviewed by one internal and (at least) one external reviewer. We are
grateful to the authors, all of whom reviewed papers, and to the following external
reviewers: Kersti Börjars, Vladimir Borschev, Michael Daniel, Walter De Mulder,
Benjamin Fagard, Alex Grosu, Jukka Havu, Yury Lander, Lutz Marten, Jan Rijkhoff,
Anette Rosenbach and An Van linden. At John Benjamins, we would like to thank
Anke de Looper, who was always extremely quick and helpful in dealing with any
questions we had.
Anne Carlier & Jean-Christophe Verstraete

Genitive case and genitive constructions
An introduction
Anne Carlier and Jean-Christophe Verstraete
University of Lille 3, CNRS UMR 8163 STL and University of Leuven
1. Introduction
A definition of genitives usually starts out from the notion of an inflectional category
for nouns, which in its core function labels adnominal relations, prototypically in the
domain of possession (see, for instance, Creissels 2006, Lander 2008). The structure in
(1) provides an example from Northern Akhvakh, a Northeast Caucasian language
spoken in Daghestan and Azerbaijan. The suffix -󰂄i on the noun for ‘girl’ marks a de-
pendency relation with the head noun ‘dress’, in this instance interpreted as a posses-
sive relation of ownership or control.
(1) Northern Akhvakh (Andic, Northeast Caucasian)
jašo-󰂒i šišal’e1
girl-gen dress
‘the girl’s dress’ (Creissels, this volume)
As is well-known from the literature, however, this is really only the prototype of what
a ‘genitive’ can be, or maybe even the linguist’s prototype (as noted in Van de Velde’s
canonical typology approach in this volume). There are a number of ways in which
actual genitive forms can differ from this central type. One dimension of variation is
semantic. The adnominal relations marked by genitive forms are usually not restricted
to possession – even in a broad sense – but can include a range of other relations, up
to the point where it becomes difficult to provide any specific semantic description to
cover the entire range. An example is provided by the Finnish structure in (2), where
the dependency relation marked by the genitive is not one of possession, but could be
interpreted as indicating origin.
(2) Finnish (Finnic, Uralic)
Lapi-n mies
Lapland-gen man.nom
‘a man from Lapland’ (Mahieu, this volume)