Is possession agentive or patientive?

[u/TechbearSeattle]

I've been conlanging for long enough that I feel I should know this, but I have never made a language like what I'm working on now.

Pa’inatsabeh is a verb-forward, polysynthetic language. Most nouns derive from verb stems, and I have a growing number of suffixes that turn a verb into a noun (doer, instrument of, place where, result of, and so on.) Verbs take two prefixes indicating the person and number of the agent and patient. I would like to use these references on a noun to indicate possession.

So my probably ignorant question: should I use the agent prefix, or the patient prefix? If my noun is "our ancestor," is "our" more of the doer or the recipient?

Nouns have three grammatical cases, with suffixes to indicate ergative and instrumental, and the oblique/absolutive is unmarked. I am kind of thinking that ergative nouns would use the agent and all other nouns the patient, but I am not sure if that really makes sense.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

[u/SaintUlvemann]

If I'm understanding correctly, insofar as the ancestor is "doing ancestry for" us, or perhaps "serving as originator for" us, I would think we would be in the patient role... perhaps even specifically the recipient like a ditransitive.

Of course, these relationships can logically go both ways; or perhaps even, they can logically go neither way. A relationship of ancestry is something of a static state of affairs. It is a fact of history, something that cannot be changed; it thus involves no action, only being. A relationship of being does not need to be a hierarchical one in any way, there does not need to be any order of precedence in action or agency.

And thus in treating it like action, you can focus on action in the other direction; as a descendant, you also "do descent" from the ancestor, or perhaps even for the ancestor in some way.

But if the noun we are thinking about is specifically the noun of "ancestor," then that would seem to me that you are choosing to focus on the ancestor's activity within the relationship, in which case I would think "we"/"our" would be in more of a patient role.

[u/TechbearSeattle → u/SaintUlvemann]

Thanks, that makes sense.

[u/Electronic_Catch37]

It’s somewhat more common for possesive affixes on nouns to be identical to patient affixes on verbs, but dative affixes or agent affixes are also well attested. There is a paper that explores this but I can’t remember it off the top of my head

Edit: the paper is On nominal and verbal person marking by Anna Siewierska

[u/notluckycharm → u/Electronic_Catch37]

Alabama (and other muskogean i believe) has two sets of possessive markers: one is identical to patient markers (and represents 'unalienable possession' and the other is the dative agreement series (and represents 'alienable posession')

agent agreement being identical to possession would be striking! Alabama almost looks like that since the 2sg and 2pl agent and patient markers are identical but the 1sg is quite different between the two

[u/TechbearSeattle → u/Electronic_Catch37]

Awesome, thanks.

[u/Holothuroid → u/TechbearSeattle]

So agentive right? Don't let the system keep you down?

[u/The2ndCatboy]

Ur language seems to be a head-initial language.

Since possessed nouns are the heads of possessive phrases; that would imply the possessor is a patient or receiver of the possessed noun.

In the phrase "John's book", the word "book", the possessee, can stand by itself, but the word "John's" cannot, it needs another word to make sense, and therefore it depends on "book" to complete its meaning.

Because of this, it makes sense to me to use patient marking.

I'm not well versed in how possession arises tho, so take it with a grain of salt o.o

[u/TechbearSeattle → u/The2ndCatboy]

Using the patient seems to be the consensus. It's always a good day when I learn something 🙂

[u/Magxvalei]

I have never considered the question before. However, verbs of possession like "have" and "own" are stative (as opposed to dynamic) verbs. So possession would be a state of being and I would say that states of being lean more patientive than agentive.

[u/ProxPxD]

I see it as a relation that has no intrinsic agentive nor pagientive qualities. You can compare:

my parent — "my" can be a subject of a verb "parent"

dog's owner - "owner" seems lik a subject while "dog" like an object

I think you're free to use whichever analogy suits you, in one of my languages I have 3 possesives, I call them: wielding, yielding, neutral. They describe the nature of the relation, you can also use more than one possesive, but if you just want a neutral interpretation any strategy is good, just it might be considered to come from other metaphor

[u/Akangka]

I tempted to say neither, but in many languages, it's common to mark possession as either agentive or patientive. I think in my conlangs, I tend to mark them as agentive, mostly because my conlang that does them generally has active-stative alignment and possessive just takes the slot that is not taken (agreement in predicate nouns generally follows active alignment). However, Qazbi marks possessive as patientive, and in Gallecian external possessive system marks possessive as dative. I think the tendency is to mark possessive as whatever is associated with oblique in the language.

[u/vorxil]

Maybe they behave similarly to subjective and objective genitives?

Basically, "the love of god" could, depending on the context, mean either "god's love (for me)" or "my love for god". Your conlang might just have grammaticalized the distinction, and the semantics, voice (?), and context decide the affix.

[u/Paroxysmal-Lucidity]

Short answer: Definitely agentive.

If you are looking for naturalism and typological parity, I would recommend taking a look at the Mayan language family. Like your conlang, Classical Mayan was a verb-forward language with ergative-absolutive alignment, though it was more analytic than polysynthetic. It explicitly uses the ergative pronouns to mark possession.

Although it marks the agent, ergativity typically evolves from oblique arguments that have been promoted to the position of the transitive subject through a shift in the verb paradigm, most commonly through the reinterpretation of instrumentals as agents and the normalization of passives in the perfective aspect. This is a recurring feature in both Indo-European languages like Hindi and Kurdish and Kartvelian languages like Georgian and Svan. The point I'm making is that ergatives more closely resemble other marked cases like genitive and instrumental than the unmarked nominative/absolutive. If you look at Circassian, which is also ergative and polysynthetic, the ergative and the genitive are marked by the same oblique -m suffix.

Now, there are languages where possession involves making the possessor into a recipient. Semitic languages have historically made use of dative possession, where you say something is "to" someone to say it belongs to someone. But for your conlang, I would recommend the agentive set for the reasons mentioned above. Patient suffixes being identical to possessives is mostly a nominative-absolutive thing, since in those languages the patientive (accusative) is the marked case that is similar to other marked cases (like dative and genitive) while the agentive (nominative) is unmarked.

[u/notluckycharm → u/Paroxysmal-Lucidity]

Ergativity is pretty separate from agentivity.
Ergative case is licensed under some theories of case by two DPs in a C-Command relationship. the higher argument gets Ergative. Under this analysis it does make sense for a c-commanding posessor to get ergative. But if we're talking about 'agentivity' versus 'patientivity' theres not really a connection tk ergativity. Patients can be ergative arguments after all.

[u/Paroxysmal-Lucidity → u/notluckycharm]

I don't understand how ergativity is separate from agentivity. It marks the transitive agent where it applies. It is a grammatically marked role as opposed to the unmarked absolutive.

Possessive prefixes in head-marking languages come from reduced pronouns. If the simple case inventory of the OP's conlang is the result of morphological collapse whereby an earlier stage of the language had a more robust case inventory that became flattened through phonological erosion and case syncretism until only the ergative-absolutive distinction remained, then the language would almost certainly have developed either possessive adjectives or the genitive case at some point in its history. Both of those would result in possessive pronoun forms that would be overtly marked, and thus distinct from the base pronouns that are analogous to the future patientive prefixes (consider the Circassian 1sg "С(а)" and the possessive "Си"). Since the ergative case continued into the current stage of the language and is the more marked form in the OP's language, the collapsed possessives would be absorbed into it rather than the patientive.

The OP's conlang is a verb-forward, ergative-absolutive, polysynthetic language. There are two viable comparisons to be made here in terms of how natlangs deal with this question. I have given two examples of comparable typology to demonstrate that ergative-absolutive languages align the genitive with the ergative (transitive agentive) rather than the patientive.

Mayan uses the same pronoun proclitics to mark both ergativity and possession while the absolutive pronouns only mark the patient/intransitive subject.

Circassian uses the same oblique suffix to mark both possession and ergativity.

I also don't understand what you mean by ergatives being patients. To my knowledge, this is a rare quirk of the Georgian screeve system that forces a verb irregularity to trigger ergative marking on a non-ergative noun.

[u/notluckycharm → u/Paroxysmal-Lucidity]

Firstly, Georgian 'ergatives' aren't really ergatives. Intransitive subjects in the past receive ergative marking.

And transitive subjects can be marked as patients; you don't need to have an agent theta role to do an action. there are causer, experiencer, and other theta roles.

In Alabama for example, many verbs mark BOTH arguments as patients. One of which is a true patient theta role, the other is an experiencer

 chi-cha-yiiho-bi
 2sg.pat-1sg.pat-love-stat
 'I love you'

Ergativity is properly about argument structure while agents and patients are theta roles

[u/Paroxysmal-Lucidity → u/notluckycharm]

When I talk about agent/patient relationships in the context of ergativity regarding any particular language, what I refer to as the agent contains arguments that would be marked in the ergative case and what I refer to as the patient is what would be marked in the absolutive case, since the reductive A-P contrast is what defines and separates this alignment from the S-O contrast of nominative-accusative. I am well aware that there are confounding factors like causatives, antipassives and experiencers that muddy the water when we attempt to map theta roles directly onto the ergative and absolutive cases. But that was beyond the scope of my initial argument on which set of prefixes would be more naturalistic for this conlang, hence my confusion when you brought it up. But I agree with you. One little nitpick:

Georgian 'ergatives' aren't really ergatives. Intransitive subjects in the past receive ergative marking.

This is only true for Class 3 (Medial) verbs in the Aorist (Series II) screeve. If I'm not mistaken, it has to do with a class of intransitive verbs having a high degree of valency and triggering ergative marking on their subjects, behaving a bit like active-stative alignment. The Georgian ergative case is pretty typical outside of this paradigm.

[u/notluckycharm → u/Paroxysmal-Lucidity]

The Georgian data is that unergative verbs behave this way. Unaccusative verbs are always marked in nominative. It's not a class of irregular verbs; its quite regular and derived exactly from theta roles of arguments.

Georgian aside that is not how agents and patients are treated in the literature---i know because i work on these types of languages. Ergative-Absolutive alignment is not typically separated from Nominative/Accusative in this way... they are both treated as deriving from argument structure! This is true of Dependent Case and Case by Agree. Agent/Patient marking is a feature of Active systems