| old_uid | 12055 |
|---|
| title | Possessive NPs in Arabic: alienable vs. inalienable possession |
|---|
| start_date | 2013/02/04 |
|---|
| schedule | 10h-12h |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| location_info | salle D 328 |
|---|
| summary | Possessive noun phrases in Arabic, and more generally in Semitic, have been the focus of much discussion and research, and there is no attempt here to do justice to the vast amount of literature (see among others Benmamoun 2000, Borer 1989, Fassi Fehri 1999, Mohammad 1989, Ouhalla 2000, 2009, 2011, Ritter 1988, Shlonslky 2004). Rather we will focus on a specific type of inalienable possessive noun phrases in some varieties of Moroccan Arabic, compared with other Middle Eastern Arabic varieties and Classical Arabic. Of interest are possessive NPs of the form bu + possessee noun, which show interesting properties related to definiteness, gender and number. They are compared with alienable possessives of the form mul + possessee noun. Consider the forms in (1), from the variety of Arabic spoken in Western Morocco (similar forms are found in Algerian Arabic, see Guella 2009: 258):
…
In the forms in (1a), which generally include body parts and specific physical characteristics, bu is never inflected for number; while feminine gender may be marked by mu (our informant accepts both bu and mu in the feminine forms). On the contrary, in the forms in (1b) mul is inflected for gender and number (mul MS / mulat FS / malin MP / malyat FP). The forms in (1a) further show that the nouns associated with bu are indefinite.
Inalienable noun phrases of the type in (1a) are also found in Classical Arabic and in certain Middle Eastern Arabic varieties, such as Egyptian Arabic and Palestinian Arabic. They show the following pattern: ?abu 'father' + Noun (e.g. in Egyptian Arabic: ?abu ?anab ‘whiskered’, ?abu bat??a ‘bald-headed’, ?abu qubba ‘hunchbacked’, ?abu ?ura ‘one-eyed’). Egyptian Arabic also has forms of
the type in (1b), but uses s?a?eb ‘friend, owner’ instead of mul: e.g. s?a?eb elbi:t ‘homeowner’.
Possessive nPs like in (1) will be assigned a structure in which bu and mul are heads, and the possessee noun the complement. The lack of definiteness and number in the forms in (1a) derives, we argue, from the fact that bu is projected lower in the structure than mul. That is, forms like buras ‘stubborn’ are projected inside DP with no functional head for number and gender, whereas forms like mul ddar ‘homeowner’ contain a possessive phrase projected outside DP and headed by mul. PossP is regarded as the locus of number and gender specifications of the entire construction, since the number and gender of the head determines the number and gender of the whole form.
References:
Benmamoun, E. 2000. The feature structure of functional categories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Borer, H. 1989. On the morphological parallelism between compounds and constructs. In G. Booij & J. van Marle (eds.) Morphology Yearbook, 45-64. Dordrecht: Foris.
Fassi Fehri, A. 1999. Arabic modifying adjectives and DP structures. Studia Linguistica 53: 105-154. Mohammad, Mohammad. 1989. The sentential structure of Arabic. PhD dissertation, University of Southern California.
Guella, N. 2009. Relations possessives en dialecte arabe : une approche heuristique. Synergies Algérie
7: 255-266.
Ouhalla, J. 2009. Variation and change in possessive noun phrases: The evolution of the analytic type and the loss of the synthetic type. Brill's Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 1: 311-337.
Ouhalla, J. 2011. Preposition-possessum agreement and predication in possessive noun phrases. Brill's Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 3: 111-139.
Ritter, E. 1988. A head-movement approach to construct state noun phrases. Linguistics 26: 909-930. Shlonslky, U. 2004. The form of the Semitic noun phrases. Lingua 114: 1465-1526. |
|---|
| responsibles | Soare, Ferret |
|---|
| |