External possession of body-part nouns in Dinka
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Torben Andersen
Abstract
In Dinka, a Western Nilotic language, body-part nouns may be externally possessed. External possession is possible and the default option if the body-part noun is semantically part of a transitive object, an unaccusative subject, or a copula subject. With transitive and ditransitive verbs, the external possessor is object, and with intransitive and copulative verbs, it is subject. Externally possessed body-part nouns have no grammatical relation to the verb, and they are restricted to occurring in dedicated syntactic slots of the clause, adjacent to a slot used by the main verb when the finite verb is an auxiliary. In transitive clauses, the body-part noun occurs immediately after that slot. In intransitive and copulative clauses, it occurs immediately before the same slot, and here a phonologically determined subset of the body-part nouns are morphologically marked by tone shift as being externally possessed. These facts suggest that the possessum forms some kind of unit with the verb that is reminiscent of noun incorporation. In Dinka, the referent of virtually any noun can be conceived of a having a body part, and therefore virtually anything can be an external possessor: pronouns, animate nouns, and inanimate nouns, including abstract nouns.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on fieldwork carried out during a number of trips to South Sudan and Sudan between 1984 and 1995 and again in 2009. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities and from the Nordic Africa Institute. I also wish to thank my principal Dinka informants Isaac Maker, Kuyok Abol Kuyok, David Daniel Marial and Peter Gum Panther for their assistance. In addition, I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande
- Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English
- Assessing productivity in contact: Italian derivation in Maltese
- Syntactic structures of Mandarin purposives
- External possession of body-part nouns in Dinka
- The use of any with factive predicates
- Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo
- Notice from the Board of Editors
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande
- Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English
- Assessing productivity in contact: Italian derivation in Maltese
- Syntactic structures of Mandarin purposives
- External possession of body-part nouns in Dinka
- The use of any with factive predicates
- Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo
- Notice from the Board of Editors
