Papers From The Second Annual Meeting Of The Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 1992
Language:
English
Abstract:
White Hmong (Hmong-Mien) possessive constructions, consisting of a (singular, usually proper) noun followed by a (dual or plural) expansion pronoun that may act as possessor of a following noun, are noted to present an interpretation problem as to whether the pronoun is treated as a possessed noun, or the first noun is treated as a topic within the noun phrase (NP), as in an unmarked possessive construction, the possessor precedes the possessed noun. Both analyses are considered, & because it more closely parallels general syntactic patterns in Hmong, the topicalized NP analysis is preferred. The typological significance of this construction as a characteristic of topic-prominent languages is then discussed. 15 References. S. Novak