A Unified Account of Hausa Genitive Constructions

Abstract

In this paper I shall propose an analysis of the Hausa bound genitive marker which unifies its use in possessives and partitives with that in gerundive and pre-nominal adjectival constructions (see Newman, 2000 and Jaggar, 2001 for a detailed overview). I shall provide evidence that the bound genitive marker -n/-r is not simply an enclitic variant of the free form marker na/ta derived at a surface phonological level, but rather an affix attached in the morphology. Under the analysis proposed here, the free form is an instance of dependent marking, mainly used for possessive modifiers, whereas the bound form is an instance of head-marking, signalling the presence of an adjacent in-situ complement. The formal analysis, which is carried out in the framework of HPSG (Pollard and Sag, 1994), will make crucial use of type-raising in the sense of Kim and Sag (1995) and Iida et al. (1994), in order to model head-marking of possessives and pre-nominal adjectives on a par with complement-taking strong verbal nouns (gerunds). Furthermore, the head-marking approach to the bound linker also connects the presence vs. absence of this marker to a more general property of the language, namely direct object marking (Crysmann, 2005).