Possessee-like Qualifier Constructions in Northern Sub-Saharan Africa

International audience This paper provides a comparative overview of possessee-like qualifier constructions in the languages of Northern Sub-Saharan Africa. In such constructions, a qualifier is construed as the head of a genitive construction, i.e. as if it were a possessee, whereas the qualified noun appears in the position of the possessor. Consequently, such constructions have a mismatch between semantic and formal dependency relations, in that the semantic dependent is construed as the head from a morphosyntactic point of view. An example is provided in (1a). The qualifier ɛ̀-nɛ́n ‘broad’ is a noun of class 5 that determines agreement on the genitive proclitic, which attaches to the qualified noun zɛ̌n ‘road’. For comparison, an example of a regular genitive construction is provided in (1b).(1)Eton (Bantu, Cameroon; Van de Velde & Essele Essele 2022: 111)a.ɛ̀nɛ́n ɛ́ ꜜzɛ́nɛ̀-nɛ́nɛ́=zɛ̌n5-broadGEN5=9.road‘a broad road’b.ɛ̀ndúmgí ɛ́ ndáɛ̀-ndúmgíɛ́=ndá5-cornerGEN5=9.house‘a corner of the house’Although the phenomenon appears to remain little known, it is not rare in the languages of the world (see also Shirtz & Gildea). It has been described by Ross (1998) in the Austronesian languages of Northwest Melanesia under the name PLAC (short for Possessive-Like Attributive Constructions) and noticed in several languages of South America (see, e.g. Krasnoukhova 2022). Malchukov (2000) has called it DRNA (Dependency Reversal in Noun-Attributive constructions) and signals its existence in a small number of languages, including Aleut and Chinook. The phenomenon needs to be distinguished from so-called expressive binominal NPs (Foolen 2004), such as English a whopper of a house or French ce fripon de valet ‘this crook of a servant’, which are much more common in the languages of the world.Two aspects of possessee-like qualifier constructions in African languages are noteworthy. First, they show considerable typological variation in their formal properties as well as in their degree of entrenchment in the grammars of languages that have them. Second, they are clearly an areal phenomenon in Northern Sub-Saharan Africa, where its presence cuts across genealogical groupings. Among the 550 Bantu languages, for instance, they are only found in about a dozen languages spoken in the far North-West of the domain. In Northern Melanesia too, the presence of possessee-like qualifiers is areally determined, rather than genealogically. Taken together, these two observations strongly suggest that a constructional metaphor “treat qualities as the possessee of a possessive construction” has spread via borrowing in Northern Sub-Saharan Africa.ReferencesFoolen, Ad. 2004. Expressive binominal NPs in Germanic and Romance languages. Studies in linguistic motivation, 75-100.Krasnoukhova, Olga. 2022. Attributive modification in South Americanindigenous languages. Linguistics 60(3): 745–807.Malchukov, Andrej L. 2000. Dependency reversal in noun-attributive constructions: towards a typology. München: LINCOM.Shirtz, Shahar & Spike Gildea 2019 (ms.). Isomorphic coexpression across modification constructions: Modifiers that act like heads in possession constructions. A workshop proposal for SLE 2020 (Bucharest, Romania).Ross, Malcolm 1998. Possessive-like attributive constructions in the Oceanic languages of Northwest Melanesia. Oceanic Linguistics 37 (2): 234-276.Van de Velde, Mark & Kisito Essele Essele. 2022. Dictionnaire éton-français. Yaoundé: Editions Clé.