Morphological analysis of alienability contrast in Nuer: an atypical typical case
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Irina Monich
Abstract
This article presents evidence that alienable versus inalienable possession is distinguished in the morphology of Nuer, a West Nilotic language. Although the distinction in possession type is subtle due to Nuer morphology being mostly non-segmental and is additionally obfuscated by numerous exceptions, we show that Nuer conforms to the well-established typological observation that alienable possessive constructions involve more structural complexity than inalienable ones. We argue that alienable possession is marked on the possessum with a non-segmental suffix owing to the presence of PossP structural layer; in contrast, inalienable possession involves a simple juxtaposition of the possessum and the possessor, which are in a head-complement configuration. These structural assumptions account for several morphological patterns where possessed nouns behave differently based on possession type. We also suggest that the exceptional patterns can be dealt with under a presumption that another non-segmental morpheme – the linker – intervenes between the possessum and the possessor when one of them is larger than a monosyllable.
Acknowledgements
Research presented in this article was funded by Princeton University. First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to John Chuol Kuek for his remarkable intuitions and insights into Nuer language and for his patience. I also thank Chuol Tut, Mathew Juany Riek, Lam Muang, Jacob Gatkuoth, John Makuac for sharing their knowledge with me, and the Nuer community of San Diego as a whole for their welcome and support. I am also grateful to the following researchers who have been instrumental in providing me with resources, assistance and valuable feedback: Matthew Baerman, Bert Remijsen, Oliver Bond, Tatiana Reid, Florian Lionnet, Laura Kalin, Sharon Rose and Noam Faust. Their input is greatly appreciated. The first draft of this article has been presented at the 15th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, held at University of Edinburgh, Aug. 4–6 2021. I am grateful to the audience and the organizers for their participation and response.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The syntax of wh-phrases, narrow foci, and neg-words in Georgian
- Morphological analysis of alienability contrast in Nuer: an atypical typical case
- Hanging Topic Left Dislocations as extrasentential constituents: toward a paratactic account. Evidence from English and Spanish
- Towards a theory of syntactic workspaces: neighbourhoods and distances in a lexicalised grammar
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The syntax of wh-phrases, narrow foci, and neg-words in Georgian
- Morphological analysis of alienability contrast in Nuer: an atypical typical case
- Hanging Topic Left Dislocations as extrasentential constituents: toward a paratactic account. Evidence from English and Spanish
- Towards a theory of syntactic workspaces: neighbourhoods and distances in a lexicalised grammar
