Possessive and transitive in Eskimo
ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to give an account of some hitherto unexplained phenomena connected with the use of the Eskimo ‘relative case’. A deep structure is proposed that not only will account for the occurrence of certain surface morphemes, but also, and in a natural way, for the seman...
| Published in: | Journal of Linguistics |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
1970
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022226700002358 https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022226700002358 |
| Summary: | ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to give an account of some hitherto unexplained phenomena connected with the use of the Eskimo ‘relative case’. A deep structure is proposed that not only will account for the occurrence of certain surface morphemes, but also, and in a natural way, for the semantic affinities that exist between certain types of noun phrases and the transitive sentence in Eskimo. In particular, it is shown that in phrases of the type ‘the man's house’, there exists evidence for considering ‘man’ as the subject noun phrase, ‘house’ as the object noun phrase of some deep structure. The transformational machinery involved in deriving the correct surface structures is shown in some detail. A discussion of older terminology in Eskimo grammatical tradition provides additional, indirect confirmation of the naturalness of the proposed explanation. |
|---|