Commonalities of French and Mandarin Inalienable Possession  

Oleh:

Kliffer, Michael D.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 18 no. 1-2 (1996), page 53-69.
Topik: possession; inalienable possession; iconicity; prototype theory
Fulltext: 18_01-02_Kliffer.pdf (987.52KB)

Isi artikel

In terms of structure and prototype sub-classes, French and Mandarin present virtually no common ground in their treatment of inalienable possession (iposs). Most of French iposs grammar involves body parts or personal traits much more than kin terms. Mandarin iposs is more diffuse: whether kin terms or body parts rank higher on the prototypicality scale depends on the criteria selected. For associative phrases, Chappell/Thompson 1992 and others have found kin terms to have a significantly higher incidence of de omission than body parts. Other structures like the Passive of Bodily Effect (Chappell 1986) and Double Nominatives (Teng 1974) give body parts the edge. In spite of these apparent differences, French and Mandarin present numerous commonalities for iposs. First, they both support the iconicity principle (Haiman 1985), by which inalienables, having a closer link to their possessor, manifest less morpho-syntactic distance from it than do alienables. (The confirmation from French is less obvious because often two formatives are involved for iposs as compared with one for alienables.) Secondly, both make available alternative constructions which render the inalienable salient such that the part-whole relation is attenuated or dispensed with. Thirdly, the two languages display marginal treatment of personal sphere items like clothing and bodily attributes. Finally, both manifest iposs structures which generally specialize in either body parts or kin terms. The lack of coexistence of these latter two categories in most constructions, as well as their difference in animacy and topicality, suggest that we are dealing with two disparate classes which should not be indiscriminately filed together in a cross-linguistic prototype analysis of inalienability.

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