Nouns and noun phrases
Eŋes is one of those languages where nouns see much less elaboration than verbs. Still, there’s some interesting stuff to say about them…
Case-marking
In the last post I said that the negative has the most complicated allomorphy of any Eŋes morpheme. I am now forced to recant: in fact, the
accusative case (the only noun case in Eŋes) is more complicated. The accusative marker is placed at the very beginning of the noun phrase, with its form depending on the following morpheme in a not entirely concatenative manner:
- If the following morpheme starts with a consonant:
- Before consonant clusters, the accusative is se-: se-mŋun ‘the eye’, dfin → se-dfin ‘hand’
- Before voiceless consonants other than /s t/, the accusative is s-: kun → s-kun ‘the fly’, pomay → s-pomay ‘the jug’
- Before voiced consonants other than /r/, the accusative is r- (/ʒ-/): banaʔ → r-banaʔ ‘the sky’, mec → r-mec ‘the year’
- Initial t- or tC- become s- or se-sC-, respectively: tam → sam ‘the food’, tno → se-sno ‘the rope’
- Initial s- or r- remains unchanged: sal ‘(the) fire’, res ’(the) yam’.
- If the following morpheme starts with a vowel, it depends on the form taken by the noun in hiatus:
- If the hiatus form would start with /ʔ/, the accusative is s-: ap → s-ap ‘the arrow’, ansefoŋ → s-ansefoŋ ‘the place’
- Otherwise the accusative is se- followed by the hiatus form: inab → se-nab ‘the dog’, aŋnap → se-ŋnap ‘the island’
- Pronouns can be irregular.
(Note, incidentally, that there’s only three actual forms here:
r-,
s- and
se-. The complexity comes from their conditioning, and the nonconcatenativity.)
You’ll observe that I glossed the above forms as definite. This is because the accusative is only marked on definite NPs (including pronouns etc.). Indefinite objects never receive accusative marking.
There is another restriction on the accusative: it is limited to immediately pre-verbal objects. If an object is focussed or postposed, it loses any accusative marking which might have otherwise been present.
Thus, case-marking is a rather ‘surface-level’ feature of Eŋes, so to speak. It’s simply a marker of definite, preverbal nouns. Unlike many other languages, Eŋes displays no interesting phenomena where nouns are case-marked in unexpected ways (like accusative subjects and whatnot), or where other things depend on case-marking.
Possession
Aside from the accusative marker, a possessor NP is the only element which can come before the head noun. Ignoring elements after the head, the maximal linear order is therefore accusative—possessor—possessive.marker—head.
Eŋes distinguishes between two types of possession, depending on the possessed noun:
inalienable and
alienable. Starting with the former, inalienably possessed nouns include the following:
- Kinship terms: mem ‘mother’, dar ‘father’, etc.
- Orientational and relational nouns: nur ‘front’, kra ‘on top’, etc.
- Some miscellaneous nouns: not many, most notably leŋ ‘name’ and rweʔses ‘friend’
Notably, body-part terms are
not inalienably possessed. This is unusual, but maintains a distinction between relational and body-part nouns, which are often homophonous: e.g.
bnur ‘in front of me’ vs
bmonur ‘my head’.
The marking of inalienable possession uses the same morphemes used for subject marking on verbs (the ‘subject’ column
here). These morphemes are placed before the head noun (in the ‘possessive.marker’ slot mentioned above). For pronominal possessors, this is sufficient. For nominal possessors, the possessor is placed before the possessive marker: e.g.
eŋes ∅-dar ‘the person’s father’, or
eŋes in-dar ‘the peoples’ fathers’.
In the previous example, we see an interesting consequence of this construction — third person singular possession is zero-marked. This remains true even if the possessor is pronominal: thus
dar could mean either ‘a/the father’, or ’his/her father’. We could argue that these nouns are not just inalienably possessed, but
obligatorily possessed. A possessor is always implied, even if it’s simply ‘it’.
(If one
really wants to add an explicit possessor, it’s always possible to use a demonstrative: e.g.
naʔos dar ‘the said person’s father’.)
Nouns other than those listed above are alienably possessed. This works basically the same way as inalienable possession, but with a different set of markers:
| Person | Singular | Plural |
| 1 | bgo- | baŋo- |
| 2 | ndo- | ndo- |
| 3 | (o)ŋo- | (i)ŋiŋo- |
(Which I just realised I forgot to add to the
pronouns post, whoops…)
Note that these are vowel-final and thus trigger the hiatus form of the possessed noun: e.g.
aŋnap ‘island’ but
bgoŋnap ‘my island’ (also cf.
seŋnap ‘the island’ above). Additionally, the third-person markers delete their initial vowel if they immediately follow a vowel: thus
dfin oŋownus ‘the man’s hand’, but
anu ŋownus ‘the man’s job’. The accusative is also considered to trigger hiatus:
seŋownus ‘his hand (object)’.
Adjectives and compounds
The head noun can be immediately followed by an
adjective. The noun and adjective behave for all purposes as a single unit: they have one stressed syllable (namely the ultimate), they undergo hiatus avoidance and other phonological processes, they are non-interruptable by any other element, and so on. The noun
anu ‘thing’ can be used as a generic base: e.g.
anu-ʔenar ‘hot thing’. (Incidentally, note how
-enar takes its hiatus form here after a vowel.)
Adnominal adjectives are subject to an important restriction: a noun can be directly modified by at most one adjective. If two adjectives are really desired, a relative clause can be used: e.g.
kuŋ-kbuy ‘old fly’ vs
kum-bli na wakbuy ‘old, heavy fly’. (Again, note the action of phonological rules, in this case changing the final consonant of
kun ‘fly’ due to nasal assimilation.) In fact, speakers may use a relative clause even when there is only one adjective:
kun na wakbuy ‘fly which is old’.
(Please, don’t sue me for the contrived examples… if I had better ones, I would use them…)
An interesting consequence of the above is that
adjectives are bound morphemes. In the verb complex, they require a preceding auxiliary to be verbalised. In the noun phrase, they must occur after a head noun. There is no situation in Eŋes in which an adjective may appear by itself as a free form.
Eŋes also has a handful of true
noun compounds. In their phonological and grammatical properties, they behave just like the noun-adjective compounds already described — extending to being head-initial.
However, unlike the adjectival construction, noun compounding is hardly productive, and essentially limited to a number of fixed lexemes: e.g.
moʔ-nir ‘place-sun’ = ‘east’,
len-dfin ‘name-hand’ = ‘nickname’ And, for all their transparency, these lexemes behave in all respects as ordinary nouns, even allowing further adjectival modification:
lendfiŋ-kbuy ‘old nickname’.
To express nominal modification, Eŋes instead tends to use the alienable possessive construction. This covers the same kinds of areas for which English uses noun compounds, including idiomatic and lexicalised expressions: e.g.
kom oŋodaw ‘stomach truth’ = ‘hunch’,
fgis oŋomŋun ‘palm.tree eye’ = ‘fruit of palm tree’.
It is important to distinguish noun compounding from singular inalienable possession, which also involves unmarked noun juxtaposition. The two have very different semantics: a noun compound is head-initial, whereas inalienable possession is head-final. Two characteristics distinguish them:
- In general, the second element of a noun compound will not be a noun which can be inalienably possessed, as is the case for nir ‘sun’ and mŋun ‘eye’ above. On the other hand, in a construction like anles dar ‘the king’s father’, dar ‘father’ is in the small set of nouns which can be inalienably possessed.
- Noun compounding shows much greater phonological integration than inalienable possession does. For instance, lendfin ‘nickname’ always shows nasal assimilation (cf. standalone leŋ ‘name’), whereas a possessive construction like dfin kra ‘the top of the hand’ may be realised as /dfinˈkra/ with no nasal assimilation.
Other nominal modifiers
Several elements can be placed after the head noun or compound:
- One of the four adnominal determiners: naʔsin ‘this’, naʔsŋan ‘that’, naʔsnan ‘which / some’, or naʔsnos ‘the said’
- A quantifier, basically limited to mog ‘many’ or tam ‘some’. (Other quantifiers exist, just elsewhere: e.g. as focus particles, nouns or in the verb complex.)
- A numeral.
For Janko’s sake, I’ll list the first few numerals:
- yam
- key
- us
- mŋa
- tow
- toy
- weʔ
- sun
- sla
- ndas
Generally no more than one of these will be present in a single NP — mostly because they’re largely semantically incompatible with each other. In the very rare case where two are present, this will generally comprise a numeral followed by a determiner (as in
eŋes key naʔsŋan ‘those two people’, etc.).
Relative clauses
A relative clause, if present, is the last item in the NP. Relative clause construction is mostly simple, but has its subtleties.
Relative clauses are introduced by the relativiser
na (otherwise a demonstrative meaning ‘which’ or ‘something’). In the simplest cases, where the relative clause is mono- or divalent, the common argument is removed from the relative clause to leave a gap:
eŋes faʔntosiwigiʔnsem res ‘the person ate the mango(s) yesterday’
⇒
Blisŋumŋun eŋes [na ___ faʔnsiwigiʔnsem res] ‘I see the person [who ate the mango yesterday]’
⇒
Blisŋumŋun res [na eŋes faʔntosiwigiʔnsem ___] ‘I see the mangos [which the person ate yesterday]’
Some subtleties here:
- A transitive relative clause must always have SVO order, unlike most transitive clauses, which may be SVO or SOV (more usually the latter).
- The definite subject marker to- (here as part of a larger preverb, fanto-) requires an overt subject within the relative clause. When the subject is relativised, the marker must be deleted.
- The main clauses here also happen to have SVO order. This is not required, but long object NPs do tend to be moved postverbally.
(From now on, I’ll focus on the NP itself and not show the main clause.)
Trivalent clauses are a bit trickier. Both objects of the verb can be relativised, but to relativise the preverbal argument, it must be replaced with the special element
siw:
sam bsiwrwemisaypes inab ‘I gave the dog food’
⇒
sam [na siw bsiwrwemisaypes inab] ‘the food which I gave to the dog’
⇒
inab [na sam bsiwrwemisaypes ___] ‘the dog to which I gave food’
This isn’t the only situation where a relative clause doesn’t use gapping. When relativising on the object, an alternative to gapping is to add the object pronoun
-i (singular) or
-ey (plural). Thus the example from earlier could be rephrased as:
eŋes faʔntosiwigiʔnsem res ‘the person ate the mango(s) yesterday’
⇒
res [na eŋes faʔntosiwigiʔnsemey] ‘the mangos [which the person ate yesterday]’
(In this example
res happens to be originally postverbal, but it could have been preverbal, too.)
So Eŋes can relativise on subjects and on objects: what about other NPs? As it happens, most NPs are either subjects or objects, so this covers most cases anyway.
The major remaining case is that of possessor NPs, which
cannot be relativised. An English phrase like ‘the person [whose name is Brad]’ cannot be expressed as a single NP in Eŋes. If one does try to do so, one soon runs into difficulties: recall that the oddities of inalienable possession ensure that
leŋ means both ‘name’ and ‘his name’, so there’s no good way to mark the common argument. (A sentence like *
eŋes [na leŋ wgiŋ Brad] is simply ungrammatical.)
Additionally, focus constructions and nonverbal clauses cannot be relativised. Thus a sentence like
eŋeymen eŋes towus ‘the person talks to some of them’, with a focalised object, cannot be relativised to *
eŋes [na eŋeymen wus].
Some other miscellaneous points:
- Eŋes relative clauses are always restrictive. Thus elements such as proper nouns and demonstratives cannot head a relative clause.
- Headless relative clauses are not tolerated. As with adjectives, a generic noun like anu or eŋes can act as head instead. (Some languages allow pronouns to do this job, but of course Eŋes has no free pronouns.)
- The usual Accessibility Hierarchy would suggest that, because possessors are not relativisable, neither are standards of comparison. But Eŋes conflates standards of comparisons with direct objects, so in fact they are relativisable after all: e.g. English ‘the person [than whom I am smaller]’ ↔ eŋes [na bwsimndo ___].
