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A note on possessive constructions in Hindi-Urdu

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Yamuna Kachru
Yamuna Kachru
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana, III. 61801, U.S.A.
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Extract

In the existing grammars and pedagogical works on Hindi-Urdu, the category of possessive expressions has mainly been described on the analogy of the possessive in English (Guru, 1952: 434–438; Kellogg, 1938: 101–102; Sharma, 1958: 34–35; Vajpeyi, 1959: 127–133, 159–170, 302–305; Pořizka, 77–78, 149–150, 277).1 In these works, it has been suggested that the genitive postposition ka, the invariable postposition ke, the compound locational postposition ke pas, and the directional postposition ko predicate possession. In Hindi-Urdu, the following types of sentences in English are generally translated by constructions containing one of the above postpositions: John has a son, John has a book, John has a headache. Such an analysis of possessive expressions in Hindi-Urdu is unsatisfactory from the point of view of an overall syntactic description of the language, since it would imply that there are gaps in the system of possessive expressions in Hindi-Urdu, and hence that in a transformational grammar of these languages some possessive phrases at least could not be derived from underlying simple sentences.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 1970 , pp. 37 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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References

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