Suffixaufnahme

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Suffixaufnahme is a grammatical device that occurs in some languages with case systems. It means that possessors are inflected for the case and number of the possessee as if they were adjectives. Here a few examples from Old Albic:

(1) mbar os nderos ‘the house of the man’

(2) mbaral orol nderorol ‘at/in the house of the man’

(3) mbaran oron nderoron ‘to the house of the man’

This can be nested:

(4) mbaran attoran nderomoloran ‘to the house of the father of the man’

In the last example, nderomolaran consists of the stem ndero ‘man’, a locative ending (marking the inalienable possession) -mol, a genitive ending -as agreeing with the genitive of atto ‘father’, and the allative ending -an ‘to’ agreeing with the ending of mbar ‘house’.

For more on suffixaufnahme, and natlangs showing this phenomenon, see Wikipedia: Suffixaufnahme.

This article is part of a series on Grammar and Syntax. (Click to View) Grammar: Accusative absolute * Animacy Hierarchy * Aspect * Degrees of volition * Dual * Fluid-S * Mood * Nouns * Number * Person * Pro-Drop * Pronouns * Suffixaufnahme * Tense * Word order Syntax: Morphology * Morphological type * Morphosyntactic alignment * Nominative absolute * OSV * OVS * SOV * SVO * VOS * VSO