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Possessive and transitive in Eskimo*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Jacob Mey
Jacob Mey
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to give an account of some hitherto unexplained phenomena connected with the use of the Eskimo ‘relative case’. A deep structure is proposed that not only will account for the occurrence of certain surface morphemes, but also, and in a natural way, for the semantic affinities that exist between certain types of noun phrases and the transitive sentence in Eskimo. In particular, it is shown that in phrases of the type ‘the man's house’, there exists evidence for considering ‘man’ as the subject noun phrase, ‘house’ as the object noun phrase of some deep structure. The transformational machinery involved in deriving the correct surface structures is shown in some detail. A discussion of older terminology in Eskimo grammatical tradition provides additional, indirect confirmation of the naturalness of the proposed explanation.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 1970 , pp. 47 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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References

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