On the Categorial Status of Hausa Genitive Prepositions

Contemporary grammars of Hausa (Newman, 2000; Jaggar, 2001) recognise three major classes within the set of prepositions: a restricted set of basic (true) prepositions, a set of complex prepositions, and a set of genitive prepositions. Among the set of 14 basic prepositions listed in Jaggar (2001), we find, inter alia, à ‘in, at, on etc.’, dàgà ‘from’, dà ‘with’, zuw `̄ a ‘towards’, ta ‘via, by means’, bisà ‘above’ and gà/gàrē ‘by’. In general there is only very limited spatio-temporal differentiation within this set. Complex prepositions form a more extensive set, the main characteristic being their pattern of formation, involving an adverbial followed by the basic preposition dà ‘with’ or gà, e.g., bāya dà ‘behind’, dàbam dà ‘different from’. The third set of prepositions, i.e., genitive prepositions, are formed by the combination of a noun (or adverb) with the genitive linker -n/-r. Compared to basic prepositions, this is a fairly extensive set: Jaggar (2001) lists more than 30 members belonging to this group. Among them, a major subset serves to differentiate spatio-temporal relations, some of which are derived from nouns denoting body parts, e.g., kâ-n ‘on top of’ (< kâi ‘head’), bāya-n ‘behind’ (< bāyā ‘back’). Despite the fact that the morphological and semantic relatedness of genitive prepositions and the nouns they derive from is highly transparent, the base of the genitive prepositions is not necessarily identical to the corresponding noun: thus, besides full identity, we find differences with respect to both lexical tone and (final) vowel length: