On 8/5/2016 11:41 AM, Rhona Fenwick wrote:
jIjatlhpu' jIH:
But in {rugh bIQSIp}, {bIQSIp} by virtue of its position is clearly
qualifying the type of {rugh} - that is, "hydrogen of antimatter":
mujang SuStel, jatlh:
I think you've got that backward: in *rugh bIQSIp,* *rugh* is qualifying
the type of *bIQSIp.* It's hydrogen, of the antimatter kind.
Qualifying in the linguistic sense, yes, you're absolutely right.
That said, in a genitive of composition like this, N2 forms a subset of N1: a slice of meat, a page of a novel, grains of quadrotriticale. That's the only sense in which I meant that N2 was qualifying N1 (in the Merriam-Webster, "to reduce from a general to a particular or restricted form") - not grammatically, only pragmatically. I should have used "select" or "specify" or something similar, to avoid the technical connotations of "qualify".
That doesn't work in every N-N, though. in *baS 'In,* we're not talking about drums being a subset of all things metal; we're talking about metal drums being a subset of all drums. Yes, it's true for phrases like /meat slice/ and /novel pages,/ but not for others like /Klingon language/ or /home building/ *(juH qach)*. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name