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Possessive constructions

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Possessive constructions refer to grammatical structures that indicate ownership or association between entities, typically involving possessive pronouns, possessive nouns, or specific syntactic forms that express the relationship of possession in a language.
lightbulbAbout this topic
Possessive constructions refer to grammatical structures that indicate ownership or association between entities, typically involving possessive pronouns, possessive nouns, or specific syntactic forms that express the relationship of possession in a language.

Key research themes

1. How do semantic underspecification and pragmatic enrichment shape possessive noun phrase interpretation?

This research area investigates the interplay between semantic underspecification of possessive relations and pragmatic processes that enrich or saturate these relations in context, explaining how possessive noun phrases (NPs) receive specific referential interpretations. Understanding this interface matters because possessive constructions encode a range of relations (ownership, part-whole, kinship, spatial, temporal, etc.) with a common semantic core but variable instantiations depending on context. The precise division of labor between encoded semantic meaning and inferred pragmatic meaning informs theories of meaning composition and reference assignment.

Key finding: Argues that possessive noun phrases encode an underspecified possessive relation ‘R’ semantically, which is pragmatically enriched via saturation processes that may be optional rather than mandatory. This extends Recanati’s... Read more
Key finding: Describes possession in Slavic languages across three syntactic formats (adnominal, external possession, and predicative possession), emphasizing the semantic diversity of possessive relations encoded mainly in the adnominal... Read more
Key finding: Proposes cognitive models of possessive relations involving subject-possessor, possessed object, and subject-object relations, capturing the culturally and socially nuanced perspectives of possession such as ownership,... Read more

2. What morphosyntactic structures and typological universals govern possessive morphology and its crosslinguistic variation?

This theme explores the morphological building blocks of possessive pronouns and possessive marking in diverse languages, aiming to uncover universal structural constraints and typological patterns. It examines how possessive forms relate to genitive and other nominal case forms, the layering of possessive morphology, and the distribution of overt versus zero possessive marking. Typological insights inform broader grammatical architecture theories and constrain formal analyses of possession encoding.

Key finding: Provides broad typological evidence supporting the hypothesis that possessive pronouns are structurally ‘built on top of’ genitive forms, frequently involving a genitive pronoun plus additional morphological layers, while... Read more
Key finding: Analyzes the possessive constructions in Mandinka exhibiting a coding split between direct (unflagged) and indirect (marked by postposition lá) adnominal possession, demonstrating that this split is not primarily conditioned... Read more
Key finding: Advances a distinction between syntactic and semantic genitive in German, positing that prenominal genitive functions as a syntactic D-head modifying the head noun, while postnominal genitives can be either syntactic... Read more
Key finding: Documents and analyzes the variable instantiation of non-possessive -s morphology in Norwegian, showing its use as a plural marker on Anglicisms, a stem-internal segment (s-lexicalisation), and its extension to domestic... Read more

3. How do typological, developmental, and discourse-pragmatic factors shape variation and acquisition of possessive constructions?

This area focuses on sociolinguistic, diachronic, developmental, and pragmatics-driven variation in possessive constructions, including child language acquisition, language contact, and discourse phenomena like pronoun fronting related to possessives. Understanding these factors is crucial for revealing how possessive constructions evolve, stabilize, and function in interaction, informing both theoretical linguistics and applied fields such as language acquisition and clinical linguistics.

Key finding: Investigates possessive construction variation in two Australian mixed languages (Gurindji Kriol and Light Warlpiri), demonstrating that speaker age, inalienability distinctions, and source-language influence affect the... Read more
Key finding: Finds that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder exhibit difficulties producing and using all possessive pronouns in Jordanian Arabic, with some preference for possessive pronouns over possessive adjectives, and that IQ... Read more
Key finding: Provides corpus-based evidence that pronoun preposing in Swedish pragmatically serves to connect an utterance to prior discourse and mark the pronoun as the aboutness topic, with a strong preference for preposed pronouns... Read more
Key finding: Through experimental forced-choice tasks, demonstrates that in Argentinean Spanish, the HAVE-possessive construction (using ‘tener’) is not rigidly associated with permanent possession nor the WITH-possessive construction... Read more

All papers in Possessive constructions

The past years have witnessed a growing interest in the learning of Spanish in the lusophone world and of Portuguese in the Hispanic context. This increase, combined with the fact that native Portuguese and Spanish speakers display... more
Este trabajo explora las construcciones posesivas del mapuzugun desde la lingüística tipológica contemporánea. A partir de los datos recogidos y previa discusión bibliográfica, se establecen los esquemas posesivos prototípicos del... more
Background and aims: Syntax needs to be processed in order to understand a sentence. Here we studied the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by syntactic violations: the left anterior negativity (LAN) and the P600. LAN signals... more
Hangtani osztályok értelmezése-fogalmi tisztázás a bejegyzés sorozathoz A magyar nyelv hangtani szerkezete nemcsak fonetikai, hanem fogalmi szempontból is rétegzett és gazdag. Az alábbi szöveg azokat a kategóriákat tisztázza, amelyek... more
This work proposes a presumably complete syntactic structure of the noun phrase (NP) in Spanish, which includes the maximal projections nP (little n phrase), PossP (possessive phrase), NumP (numeral phrase), DP (determiner phrase), and QP... more
¿En qué países de habla hispana se usa la coma decimal y en cuáles, el punto decimal? ¿Y dónde hay, entre ambos tipos de notación decimal, competencia o competición? Por ejemplo, ¿en qué países las personas suelen escribir π = 3,1416…... more
Introduction Concord, or agreement, is defined as the correspondence between the morphosyntactic categories of two or more grammatical units. The most common type of concord across languages is subject-verb agreement in terms of number... more
An analysis of the rare examples of the use of l-participle/adjective as a non-finite form in adnominal phrases in the damaskini and similar sources from 17th-19th century Bulgaria and Macedonia. The participles is used mostly on place of... more
lõadásomban a jyväskyläi hungarológiai programot szeretném részletesebben bemutatni. Biztos vagyok benne, hogy többen hallottak már a jyväskyläi hungarológiáról, az ott zajló oktatásról, tudományos munkáról, s biztos vagyok abban is, hogy... more
García, Bartholomé, Manual para administrar los santos sacramentos de penitencia, aucharestia y extrema-uncion: dar gracias después de comulgar, y ayudar a bien morir a los indios de las Naciones:
This paper reports on a set of experiments designed to test the binding potential of prenominal possessives in Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian. Despić (2013) argues that the differences in binding possibilities observed between English... more
Systems of grammatical gender are widespread, yet evidence on how these systems emerge is surprisingly scarce. We report on novel research using storyboard experiments in six Oceanic languages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, to probe the... more
o The Cserged Prayers are a small set of 19th-century copies of earlier manuscripts, consisting of Protestant Lutheran hymns and other texts translated from German and written with Latin alphabet, first studied by Fran Miklosi (Miklosich... more
1 A note on terminology: I follow the distinction (adopted in the Russian linguistic tradition) between grammatical categories as obligatorily encoded sets of mutually exclusive grammatical meanings (such as tense or case) and grammemes... more
co-authored by Maksim L. Fedotov, Sofia A. Oskolskaya,
Elizaveta A. Zabelina, and Natalia M. Zaika
Dialect identification plays a crucial role in understanding the linguistic and cultural nuances of the Coptic language, the last stage of Ancient Egyptian, an Afro-Asiatic language. Despite its historical significance, there has been... more
The authors are extremely grateful to Raffaele Simone for his insightful comments to previous versions of the paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Responsibility for any errors lies solely with... more
they are, of course, free of all responsibility for my conclusions. 2 The two kinds of relationship between the possessed noun and its possessor distinguished in this system have been called different names with sometimes slightly varying... more
s Thursday 10 December What's /nu/?: Relative prolixity in Zenzontepec Chatino (Otomanguean) Eric Campbell The Zenzontepec Chatino language of Oaxaca, Mexico, is typical of Otomanguean languages in exhibiting great formal complexity... more
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. l i s t o f t o o ;: The label 'Asahi Newspaper7 in square brackets following m any of the examples shows that the sentence is taken... more
Drawing on a corpus-based typology of 24 spoken dialects of contemporary Arabic and Aramaic, we explore relevant microvariation along the VO-OV spectrum in Central Semitic, which holds implications for the still understudied VO-to-OV... more
De l'usage de l'étrangeté syntaxique : les structures agrammaticales dans la versification basque du 17 ème siècle B. Oyharçabal (CNRS, UMR IKER) §1. Introduction. 1 Le basque est réputé être une langue à ordre libre. De fait, il se... more
Romana Guarnieri 1913-ban született Hágában. A középkori női misztika egyik legnagyobb hatású olasz szakértője. Nevéhez fűződik többek között az Egyszerű lelkek tükre című középkori misztikus szöveg több kéziratának felfedezése és... more
"A szollásban-is sok rut illetlenségek vagynak, mellyek-is ez okbol származtak, hogy senki a' szóknak tulajdonságikat fel nem keresi, sem azokat a' több nyelvekhez, és ezen nyelvbéli hasonló szollásokhoz, nem alkalmaztatja, hanem tsak... more
In several regions of Japan, various dialects exhibit a peculiar suffix-me, which mostly attaches to animal names, and seems to carry out various functions. The exact nature of its use is, to some extent, still unclear, since this-me is... more
Direct object clitics in Modern Standard Romanian display different properties depending on whether or not they double an object. We propose a dual analysis for the clitics: they function as agreement makers when they double an object and... more
L'articolo indica linee guida per un insegnamento della lingua ungherese a stranieri adulti. Sono elencati i problemi riscontrati nei modelli pi\uf9 seguiti e fatte alcune proposte pratiche che vogliono aggiornare alla situazione... more
This paper presents three independent instances of a circumlocution which translates as "son of the land/earth/country." The examples span some four millennia, three continents and three biological classes. The first is an expression for... more
Azokban a több birtokra utaló szóalakokban, amelyekben a szótő mássalhangzó ra végződik, a tő és az i közötti hangszelet annyira feltűnően azonos alakú a hagyomá nyosan egyes szám harmadik személyű birtokos személyragnak vagy... more
Fenyvesi Anna -Zsigri Gyula Hangsúlytalan szó eleji szótagok adaptációja amerikai magyar kölcsönszavakban: Elméleti vonatkozások 1. Bevezetés Egy olyan nyelvben, mint a magyar, ahol az elsődleges szóhangsúly mindig a szavak első... more
A leíró hangtani osztályozások egyetértenek abban, hogy az igazodás nem eredményez fonémaváltást, a hasonulás viszont igen, az egyes esetek besorolásában mégis eltérnek egymástól. 1 Véleményem szerint ez a bizonytalanság a fonémaváltás... more
Earlier it was shown that Ainu is a relative of the Sino-Tibetan family; within the Sino-Tibetan family Ainu is quite close to the Qiangic branch. This paper continues the work on discovering structural and lexical similarities between... more
Symposion über Syntax der uralischen Sprachen 15-18. Juli 1969 in Reinhausen bei Göttingen. IM AUFTRAGE DER AKADEMIE IN GÖTTINGEN HERAUSGEGEBEN VON WOLFGANG SCHLACHTER VANDENHOECK & RUPRECHT IN GÖTTINGEN 1970. 1. 1969. július 15-18-a... more
Az -n t-re végződő igék imperatívuszáról Zrínyi Miklós nyelvében "Ne bántsd a magyart!" Zrínyi Miklósnak Az török afium ellen való orvosság című röpiratából származik ez a híres jelszó -csakhogy eredetileg nem így hangzott, mondhatnám, ha... more
Arabic nouns can be marked for definiteness or indefiniteness. The definite article is the prefix ''Al-,'' which confines the determiner class to a single element ''Al-.'' This topic is generally discussed under noun inflections, such as... more
The paper discusses issues in the grammar of Case marking in the DP by focusing on two interrelated puzzles in the syntax of Bulgarian nominalizations. The first puzzle concerns the ban on strong pronouns to act as DP-internal subjects.... more
“El estudio del lenguaje humano es un tema amplio, en este sentido es necesario abordarlo desde diferentes disciplinas y áreas para intentar comprenderlo. Estas áreas van desde la lingüística descriptiva, donde se realizan los estudios... more
It is shown in this paper that in Kavalan and some Formosan languages, verbs in object-control complements are required to undergo causativization. We argue that the peculiar requirement may be due to a well-observed constraint, i.e., the... more
Introduction Children's acquisition of an early verb lexicon constituted a major area of research in the passing decade (Berman & Armon-Lotem 1996, Bowerman 1990, Brown 1998, Clark 1993, Ninio 1999, Tomasello 1992). Of major interest... more
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