Possessive constructions in Anatolian, Hurrian, Urartean, and Armenian as evidence for language contact

Adnominal possession in Anatolian displays some peculiar features. In the Luwian languages the genitive case was replaced to varying extents by ‘genitival adjectives’ (Hajnal, 2000). In Cuneiform Luwian, where substitution is complete, it already occurs in the most ancient written sources, and must date back to pre-literary times. Hittite displays case attraction (also called partitive apposition), especially in cases of inalienable possession. Case attraction, which started in Middle Hittite replacing an older construction involving possessive clitics, consists in a nominal modifier which takes the same case as the head noun (i.e. it is treated as an adjective), rather than be inflected in the genitive. Stefanini (1969) suggested that substitution of adnominal genitives by adjectives in Luwian owes to the influence of a Hurrian construction, suffix copying (Wilhelm, 1995), in which the case suffix of the head noun is copied after the genitive suffix on the modifier. Luwian reproduced the Hurrian construction using Indo-European means already existing in Anatolian. Influence from Hurrian has also been advocated to explain the introduction of case attraction in Hittite in Luraghi (1993). In this case, too, Hittite over-extended an Indo-European construction under the influence of a non-Indo-European one. It is remarkable that Armenian also displays case attraction. According to Vogt (1936) case attraction in Armenian was brough about by contact with Georgian, a language which also has suffix copying. I would like to further explore the hypothesis of language contact, in the light of our knowledge of contacts among peoples in Anatolia. Tentatively, early appearence of genitival adjectives in Luwian can be explained by early bilingualism in the area of Kizzuwatna, while later appearance of case attraction in Hittite may show that contacts with the Hurrian during the Old Kingdom mostly remained limited to military conquest, while later they increasingly extended to the cultural and linguistic levels. The introduction of case attraction in Armenian may be dated back at least to contacts with the Urateans.