📄 The Ethio-Semitic Possessive Pronouns as Predicalizers in Historical Perspective

Summary

Kapeliuk's article appeared in Aethiopica 1 (1998); the year 2013 in the request does not match the source. It looks at cases where an Ethio-Semitic suffix pronoun that normally marks an owner does something else: it acts as the subject of an implied clause meaning "X being Y." Attached to a noun, adjective or participle, such a pronoun creates a circumstantial expression. That expression describes the state of the verb's subject or object while the action happens, rather than describing the action itself. The author compares parallel Bible verses in Ge'ez, Tigrinya and Amharic, checks them against Greek and English versions, and adds evidence from chronicles and older grammars, mainly Praetorius. Her main test is substitution: these nominal phrases can be swapped for full subordinate clauses built on a gerund. That shows a predicative link (Jespersen's nexus) between the noun and its "possessive" pronoun, and it is why she calls these pronouns predicalizers. Historically, the construction looks like a Ge'ez innovation that the modern languages mostly replaced with gerund clauses, leaving only a few fixed residues. The study shows how a morpheme's surface category can hide its real syntactic role.

Key points

• Main example (Mark 8:3, "if I send them home hungry"):
  • Tigrinya uses the word for "fast" plus a 3rd person plural suffix, with no adverbial marker at all.
  • Amharic uses the same combination but adds the accusative marker -n, which works as a ḥāl-type accusative of state.
• Tigrinya lost the accusative: despite its reputation for being conservative, Tigrinya dropped the historical accusative in both form and function. Amharic, by contrast, keeps close to Ge'ez usage, including the -a vowel in the gerund.
• Surviving modern residues: the pattern lives on in a few fixed expressions.
  • Amharic has forms for "naked" and "empty-handed," plus "alone"; the "naked" form is restricted to the adverbial use only.
  • In Tigrinya, a former adjective (now an adverb meaning "only/alone") can take the predicalizing suffix.
• Gerund replacement: in the modern languages, the Ge'ez predicalizing suffix is often replaced by a gerund of "to be." Genesis 38:11 ("remain unwed in your father's house") illustrates this.
• Comparison with Arabic: in classical Arabic, the ḥāl is always accusative and never carries a subject suffix. The author therefore treats subject suffixes on participles and adjectives as an Ethiopian feature. She suggests it was modelled on the Ge'ez gerund with a suffixed subject and was limited to bodily or mental states of humans.
• Sources used:
  • Tigrinya Bible (Asmara, 1992).
  • Amharic Bible (1980 E.C., reprinted 1994).
  • Ge'ez editions by Littmann and Dillmann.
  • Kane's Amharic and Tigrinya dictionaries.

Interesting ideas

• I1. A marker that looks possessive on the surface can actually be the subject of a hidden "be" predication; deciding which one it is depends on how the phrase relates to the main verb.
• I2. Some modifiers describe a participant's state during the event, not the manner of the action, and they stand in apposition to the verb's subject or object.
• I3. The paper shows a predicative link by checking whether a nominal phrase can be replaced with a full subordinate clause without changing the meaning.
• I4. Comparing translations of the same verse across related languages shows the function of a construction, because one language marks explicitly what another leaves unmarked.
• I5. The same function can be zero-marked (Tigrinya), case-marked (Amharic), or expressed as a clause (gerund), so analysis should rest on function rather than form.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (frames): in English phrases like "his being absent" or "with her hands empty," treat the possessor of a state noun as the holder of a state frame rather than an owner.
• I2 (world): attach depictives such as "came home hungry" or "fled naked" to the participant as a state limited to the event's time span, instead of to the event.
• I3 (learn): use clause-paraphrase equivalence as a check on silver labels for depictives and absolutes, with non-substitutable phrases as negative controls.
• I4 (learn): treat aligned translations or paraphrases as extra witnesses, so that a phrase whose function is unmarked in one version can borrow evidence from a version where it is marked.
• I5 (tree): ensure bare depictive adjectives and nouns ("left empty-handed") get a consistent UD relation such as xcomp or advcl:pred across the different surface forms.