Advances in the Syntax of DPs - Structure, agreement, and case

Possessives within and beyond NP 207

(32a) can mean a book designed for children, such as one that has large font, pictures,
etc.; crucially, the genitive possessor in ezafe-3 in (32b) cannot have that interpreta-
tion. In this respect, possessors in ezafe-2 in Tatar are not unlike lower possessives in
English (Munn 1995) or in Russian (Trugman 2007). However, unlike lower posses-
sives in Russian, ezafe-2 possessors can have a seemingly referential interpretation, yet
as we discuss in Section 5 below, such apparently referential interpretation is actually
pseudo-referential:

(32) a. bala-lar kitab-ı
child-pl book-3
‘children’s book’ (i.e. a book belonging to some children or a book
designed for children)
b. bala-lar-nıŋ kitab-ı
child-pl-gen book-3
‘(the) children’s book’ (i.e. a book belonging to some children)

The revised structures we propose for ezafe-2 and ezafe-3 are as follows:

(33) a. Ezafe-2:

PossP Poss′

PossP

bala-lar Poss^0

child-

kitab-

book

NumP

-ı

ezafe-2

b. Ezafe-3:

DP/KP D′

DP

bala-lar-nıŋ D^0

child--

kitab-

book

PossP

-ı

ezafe-3

ezafe-3 rather than ezafe-2 constructions. However, this problem is not limited to Tatar; for
example, in Russian nikto ‘nobody’ and ničto ‘nothing’ can also appear in typical referential DP
positions, such as nominative-marked predicates (e.g. On byl nikto i est’ nikto ‘He was nobody.
nom and is nobody.nom’). Therefore, we leave this issue outside the focus on this paper.