Inalienable Possession in Ṭuroyo: A Corpus Study Nikita Kuzin nickoskuzin@gmail.com Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik, Freie Universität Berlin Objective Our objective was to examine the distribution data on two pairs of possessive NPs in the Neo-Aramaic language Ṭuroyo, using the corpus of approx. 0.5 million tokens. Introduction • Data: Ṭuroyo language (Semitic → Neo-Aramaic, South-Eastern Turkey), oral literature and oral history texts (1960s-1990s) • Two adnominal possessive constructions with a nominal possessor —head-marked construction (HMC) in (1a) and independent construction (IC) in (1b): (1) a. aṯt-e wife-ez.ms d-u of-aRt.ms malko king ‘the king’s wife’ b. i aRt.fs aṯto wife d-u of-aRt.ms malko king ‘the king’s wife’ • Tere are also two sets of pronominal possessive sufxes (PPSs). Set 1 is the general and more frequent one (see Figure 3), while the use of Set 2 is restricted to nouns ending in -o, -ṯo, -to (of Aramaic origin or adapted to the Aramaic morphology) and is less frequent. Set 1 Set 2 3 m.s. -ayḏe -e 3 f.s. -ayḏa -a 3 pl. -aṯṯe -ayye Jastrow 1968 provides a list of 85 nouns which can be used with Set 2 (and in fact, in the HMC). According to him, the two sets can be used interchangeably with these nouns. Most nouns in the list belong to three semantic classes: • Body parts (raġlo ‘leg’, qarʕo ‘head’) • Inherent properties: (ʕumro ‘age’, qumṯo ‘height’) • Kinship termns (emo ‘mother’, aḥuno ‘brother’) Later research by Y. Takashina (Takashina 1980) has ques- tioned Jastrow’s claim about interchangeability, using the elicitation data. It turned out that for most nouns in Jastrow’s list the use of Set 1 was not possible and for some nouns two sets were in complementary distribution. Acnowledgements Tis presentation was created using L A T E X, beamer package with Jacobs Landscape Poster template. Analysis was conducted in R, and graphs were produced using the ggplot2 and tmap packages. General Picture • Set 1 and construction (1b) are diachronically newer possessive constructions. • Set 2 and construction (1a) are being gradually ousted. For forms with pronominal possessors the continuum is the following (the lef being the most stable category): body parts & inherent properties > ascending kin relations > descending kin relations & non-kin terms > other. • Kinship terms are the most complex group with respect to the distribution of the constructions. Body Parts & Inherent Properties • Rarely used with Set 1 and in an IC, usually when a term is used in its non-basic, more abstract meaning: lišon-i ‘my tongue’ vs. u lišon-ayḏi ‘my language’, and (2) below: (2) a. raġl-e leg-ez.ms d-u of-aRt.ms zlam man ‘the man’s leg/legs’ b. i aRt.fs raġlo leg d-u of-aRt.ms taxt bed ‘the leg of the bed’ • For some nouns, plural and singular forms with PPSs are identical: ʕarš-ux ‘your tooth’ or ‘your teeth’. • Examples where the use of Set 1 may signal the change in alienability are extremely rare: (3) a. Ṣaʕr-a hair-poss.inalien.3fs ko-mkase-ø pRes-cover.pRes-3ms ḥaṣ-a back-poss.inalien.3fs ‘Her hair covered her back’ (RT II 75:55) b. Ha kele Here is u aRt.ms ṣaʕr-ayḏa, hair-poss.3fs qəṣ-li cut.pRet-1s m-ak from-aRt.pl kaziy-at-ayḏa lock-pl-poss.3fs ‘Here is her hair, I have cut it from her locks’ (RT II 66:244) Figure 1: Turkish province Mardin, the historical habitat of Ṭuroyo Kinship terms • Two sets of PPSs are almost in complementary distribution for kinship nouns: 0 25 50 75 100 125 1p 1s 2f 2m 2p 3f 3m 3p Possessor Number of tokens Set 1 Set 2 Figure 2: Frequencies of the two sets for emo ‘mother’ • Frequency of Set 2 on kinship nouns varies within the group: mother uncle brother grandfather son daughter 0.994 0.971 0.905 0.879 0.535 0.334 Table 1: Proportions of 1 st and 2 nd person sufxes of Set 2 on kinship nouns • abro ‘son’and barṯo ‘daughter’by sufx frequencies belong to the group of nouns denoting non-kin relations: ḥawro ‘friend’ (0.583), aṯto ‘wife’ (0.393), gawro ‘husband’ (0.25). • When the possessor is nominal, the picture is diferent: ‘son’and ‘daughter’are used more frequently than other kinship terms in the HMC: ‘father’ (0.086), ‘son’ (0.355), ‘daughter’ (0.214). 162 43 132 73 0 50 100 150 200 NP Poss PRN Poss Construction type Total counts Set 2 Set 1 HMC IC Figure 3: Frequencies of four constructions, from a corpus sample, n = 205 examples for each pair Discussion Two pairs of constructions (HMC, Set 2 and IC, Set 1) fol- low well-known cross-linguistic generalizations on this type of possessive NPs (see Nichols 1988, Haspelmath 2017): • Set 1 of PPSs is morphologically more complex than Set 2. For nominal possessors, there is a tighter formal connection of two elements in a HMC than in an IC. • Te choice of the construction or the sufx for a noun is lexically determined. Te nouns which can be used with Set 2 and in an HMC form a closed set. Te signifcant language-particular properties of these con- structions in Ṭuroyo are: • A number of nouns denoting inherent physical and abstract properties of animate beings constituting a third semantic class, which can be ‘inalienably’ possessed. • Te split between 1 st and 2 nd person PPSs, on the one hand, and 3 rd person PPSs, on the other hand, for kinship nouns. Te synchronic picture in Ṭuroyo resembles that of modern Arabic di- alects, e.g. Maltese and Morocco Arabic (see Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1996). In Arabic, the opposition is between the old construct state NPs and new analytical constructions, and the development of the later has prob- ably been triggered by the loss of case markers. In Eastern Aramaic languages, to which Ṭuroyo and its ancestors belong, the change likely started when the postpositive defnite article, a distinctive feature of the Aramaic branch, had lost its grammatical functions. Te construction with head-marking has apparently come to being as means of express- ing the defniteness of a possessive NP. Te appearance of the new def- nite article and the corresponding construction (1b), however, started the process of its gradual replacement and fossilization. References Haspelmath, Martin. 2017. “Explaining alienability contrasts in adpos- sessive constructions: Predictability vs. iconicity.” Zeitschrif fur Sprachwissenschaf 36 (2): 193–231. Jastrow, Oto. 1968. Laut- und Formenlehre des neuaramäischen Dialekts von Miḏin im Ṭur ʕAbdin. Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 1996. “Possessive noun phrases in Maltese: Alienability, iconicity, and grammaticalization.” Rivista di Linguis- tica 8 (1): 245–274. Nichols, Johanna. 1988. “On alienable and inalienable possession.” In In Honor of Mary Haas. From the Haas Festival Conference on Native American Linguistics, edited by William Shipley, 557–609. Takashina, Yoshiyuki. 1980. “Sufxed Possessive Pronouns (SPP) in Ṭuroyo Dialect (Neoaramaic).” オリエント 23 (1): 45–63. Abbreviations 1, 2, 3 —1 st ,2 nd ,3 rd person; aRt —article; ez —ezafe (head-marking); fs, ms —femi- nine/masculine singular; pl —plural; poss —possessive; pRes —present; pRt —preterite; s —singular