chapter 8
Possessives within and beyond NP
Two ezafe-constructions in Tatar*
Asya Pereltsvaig & Ekaterina Lyutikova
Stanford University / Moscow State UniversityThe paper considers possessives in two ezafe-constructions in Tatar, a language
without articles. More specifically, possessives in the so-called ezafe-2 and ezafe-3
constructions are distinguished formally by the presence of the genitive case
on the possessive and the agreeing form of the possessive marker on the head
in ezafe-3, but not in ezafe-2. The two types of possessors appear in distinct
structural positions in the elaborate structure of a noun phrase, though neither of
them remains inside NP. The two types of possessives themselves are of different
size: the possessive in ezafe-3 is a full-fledged DP, but the possessive in ezafe-2 is a
Small Nominal (Pereltsvaig 2006).- Introduction
Trugman (2005, 2007 ) argued that all possessives are generated inside NP, but in overt
syntax different types of possessives appear in distinct positions. Specifically, she con-
tended that adjectival possessives in Russian formed with suffixes -ov and -in (e.g.
Adamov ‘A d a m ’s ’, Mašin ‘Masha’s’, sosedov ‘neighbour’s’, koškin ‘cat’s’) may appear in
one of two positions in overt syntax, leading to distinct interpretations. In the lower
- The title of this paper is a bow to Helen Trugman’s FASL paper (Trugman 2007). Our special
thanks to Pavel Grashchenkov, Vera Gribanova, Olga Kagan, Paul Kiparsky, Ora Matushansky,
Sergei Tatevosov, Yakov Testelets, and the audience at BLS 2013, the Tromsø Conference on
Differential Object Marking, and WAFL-9 for helpful discussions, comments, and suggestions.
We are also grateful to our Tatar consultants for their invaluable help. Finally, we thank the
anonymous reviewers for helpful questions, comments, and suggestions for improvement.
This research has been partially supported by Russian Foundation for Humanities (РГНФ,
grant No12-04-00327а), and Russian Foundation for Basic Research (РФФИ, grant No11-06-
00489-а).