Non-verbal predication in Gban. “Adnominal” predicative possessive construction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Adnominal predicative possessive construction and pragmatically “flexible” noun phrases in Gban
2016
In this article I studied the two predicative possessive constructions in Gban, which belong to the “locational” and “adnominal” formal types (lit. “A house is on John” and “John’s house exists”). They were found to be almost complementarily distributed according to which semantic types of possession they can express. The second, “adnominal”-type predicative possessive construction underwent a more detailed study. Although it has been doubted by some linguists whether there are in fact any true “adnominal” predicative possessive constructions in the languages of the world (i.e. those that are indeed based on a genuine single NP such as [John’s car]), Gban does seem to provide such a case. The “Possessor + Possessee” complex in the second predicative possessive construction here shows many properties of a single constituent and shows no differences in the syntactic behaviour from unambiguous possessive NPs in examples like ‘I saw John’s car’. At the same time, both the “Possessor + Possessee” complex and unambiguous possessive NPs in Gban only partially correspond to the theoretical expectations for an “ideal” possessive NP. They answer to these expectations in the more syntax-oriented properties, but deviate from them in the more pragmatic~semantic properties. One of these latter properties which seem unusual for NPs is the ability of both the “Possessor + Possessee” complex in the second construction and unambiguous possessive NPs to be sharply pragmatically “split”. While one part (Possessor) is fully active and topical, the other part (Possessee) can be unidentifiable and part of the focus. Cf. the possibility of questions such as, literally, “Your WHAT is there?” (‘What do you have’) or “Their WHAT did you see?” (‘What did you see of theirs?’). In the second predicative possessive construction there is also a semantic “split” — what looks and behaves syntactically as a single possessive NP here expresses, in fact, two participants of the (semantic) predicate at the same time. After that, I briefly discussed another phenomenon that demonstrates similar behaviour. There exists in Gban an alternative way of coding recipient and recipient-benefactive participants: by an adnominal NP inside the direct object NP (lit. “I bought [his clothes]” for ‘I bought clothes for him’). And in these contexts we again observe the same pragmatic “split”, and also a semantic “split”, with a single NP expressing both the undergoer and the recipient(-benefactive). To sum up, possessive noun phrases in Gban seem to have an unusual degree of pragmatic and semantic flexibility. This flexibility can be best seen in the “adnominal”-type predicative possessive construction and in the adnominal coding of recipients/recipient-benefactives. And we can also make a conjecture that probably it is this flexibility in the first place that allows such peculiar NP-based constructions to arise in a language.
This contribution deals with the linguistic expression of possession in Kukama-Kukamiria and examines potential correlations between possessive semantic relations (Heine 1997, Stassen 2009, Barker 2011) and construction types. Kukama-Kukamiria, a language spoken in the Amazon of Peru, does not have lexical verbs such as ‘have’, ‘belong,’ or a copula to predicate possession. Although the language does not have a dedicated possessive construction, possession can be inferred from several constructions, four of which are the focus of this paper.
Representation of possessiveness in the verbs of languages of different systems
Revista EntreLinguas, 2021
Possessiveness at a certain stage of development could be expressed by the forms of personal pronouns. In many languages, verbs with special indicators of belonging, which are possessive, enclitic forms of personal pronouns, form possessive conjugation. The material identity of the considered indicators in verbs and nouns shows their common origin. As the noun and the verb differentiated, these single formants were subjected to splitting: in the nouns they remained in a personal possessive meaning, and in the verbs they began to express subject-object relations. The present article contributes to the development of general linguistics and is of interest to researchers of the theory and typology of languages.
A constructional approach to the expressions of possession in IE
Many ancient IE languages show a variety of expressions of predicative possession. Of these, some are constructions involving a verb form meaning 'to be' or 'to exist' in combination with an accompanying oblique case denoting the Possessor, while the Possessee NP is constructed as the grammatical subject in the nominative case controlling a verb agreement. This paper analyses possessive constructions from IE languages (Latin, Italic, Celtic, Ancient Greek, Baltic and Indo-Iranian) within the framework of Construction Grammar, in which the basic unit of language is the construction, i.e., a form-meaning pair larger than a word. Indeed, even though the literature on possession in IE languages is vast, recent studies show that a constructional approach is particularly suited to successful syntactic reconstruction (Bergs and Diewald 2008, Barðdal et al. 2013). On the basis of the results of the comparison between the languages investigated, the aim of the analysis is two...
Nominalization and Possession in Formosan Languages
PhD Dissertation of Rice University, 2016
This dissertation investigates nominalization and possession in Formosan languages from a functional-typological perspective, where nominalization is a metonymic process of creating denoting expressions. Verbal-based and nominal-based nominalization are each the topic of the two primary parts of this study. Special attention is paid to nominalizations lacking a lexical status, covering constructions traditionally called relativization and possession.
Predicative possession in Permic. (preprint)
Approaches to Predicative Possession. The View from Slavic and Finno-Ugric, 2020
The present chapter discusses the syntactic and semantic properties of predicative possession in two Permic languages, Komi-Permyak and Udmurt from a typological point of view. In both languages, predicative possessive clauses belong to the locational subtype according to Stassen’s (2009) typology. The clauses are encoded in similar ways in these languages, since nominal and pronominal possessors are marked by the genitive case and they are followed by the verb em ‘be’ in Komi-Permyak and vań ‘be’ in Udmurt. The verbs are inflected for tense and also for number in Komi-Permyak. Possessees are unmarked in Komi-Permyak, the possessive suffix can hardly be omitted in Udmurt. Under certain syntactic criteria, the marking of the possessee can deviate from the above patterns. Semantic properties of the possessee seem to have limited effect on the encoding of the clause type in Komi-Permyak but in Udmurt some nouns denoting body parts, kinship, and abstract terms can appear without the possessive suffix. There are some questionable, possession-like constructions in both languages but on the basis of my data, none of them can be treated as real instances of possession.