The Genitive construction of Possesssion in Amharic

Abstract

This paper presents the morphosyntactic markers of the genitive construction in Amharic. In Amharic, genitive markers are bound morphemes which are either prefixed or suffixed to the noun they modify. The genitive markers show some morphological and inflectional characteristics different from languages such as English and Greek. Amharic's uniqueness makes it difficult to directly apply the methods proposed for these languages to the analysis of noun phrases that form the Amharic genitive. In this paper I present the construction of genitives in Amharic by taking examples of noun phrases that are frequently used in written and oral communication.