Suvremena lingvistika, Vol. 36 No. 69, 2010.
Izvorni znanstveni članak
Effects of (in)alienability on the expression of possessive relations in the language of Plautus’ plays
Tena Gnjatović
; Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu
Sažetak
The aim of this paper is to analyse possessive constructions in the language of Plautus’
plays and see whether there is any difference in expressing alienable and what may be
perceived as inalienable relations. Since nouns denoting kinship and body parts make up
the two most frequent semantic groups treated as inalienable in languages in which the
distinction between alienable and inalienable possession is grammaticalized, a corpus of
twelve plays was searched based on a list of possibly inalienable nouns including body
part terms and kin terms. Certain partitive relations were subsequently included in the
analysis. To see whether these putatively inalienable nouns appear in different possessive
constructions than alienable ones, the prologues and the first two acts of each of
the twelve plays were searched for instances of alienable nouns occurring in possessive
constructions, which were then compared to the first group. The general finding is that,
although the distinction between alienable and inalienable possession is not grammaticalized
in Early Latin, i.e. there is no alienability split which requires different possessive
constructions for alienables as opposed to inalienables, it seems to have been more appropriate
to use certain constructions, such as the possessive adjective or possessor promotion
and deletion, with inalienable nouns than with alienable ones. The result is a higher
frequency of these constructions in cases when the possessed noun tends to be perceived
as inalienable from the possessor.
Ključne riječi
Plautus; Titus Maccius; inalienable possessivity; possessive constructions; philological analysis; Latin language
Hrčak ID:
55664
URI
Datum izdavanja:
13.7.2010.
Posjeta: 1.790 *