Predicative possession in South Saami (original) (raw)

BASIC VERBS OF POSSESSION - A CONTRASTIVE AND TYPOLOGICAL STUDY

Unison in multiplicity: Cognitive and typological perspectives on grammar and lexis. CogniTextes Vol. 4, 2010

Verbs of possession such as HAVE and GIVE have been extensively studied both typologically and from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The present study presents an analysis of possession verbs as a semantic field with a focus on the most basic verbs. It combines a corpus-based contrastive analysis with a sketch of a general lexical typology of possession verbs. The contrastive part consists of an analysis primarily of the Swedish verbs ge 'give', få 'get' and ta 'take' and their correspondents in some genetically and/or areally related languages. Data are taken from two translation corpora, the large English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and the Multilingual Pilot Corpus (MPC) consisting of extracts from Swedish novels and their published translations into English, German, French and Finnish. The study of ta is concerned in particular with the relation between the many concrete uses of the verb, which are based on the interpretation of taking as a goal-directed action sequence. The account of Swedish ge 'give' and få 'get' are brief summaries of earlier studies concerned with patterns of polysemy and grammaticalization. In particular the verb få 'get' has a complex and relatively language-specific such pattern including modal, aspectual and causative grammatical meanings. The meanings GIVE, TAKE, GET and HAVE are all realized as verbs with very high frequency in the Germanic languages. This appears to be a rather language-specific characteristic. The typological part presents a tentative typology and gives a brief overview of some of the ways in which the corresponding meanings are realized in languages that are not included in the corpus.

10. Predicative possessive constructions in Selkup dialects

Approaches to Predicative Possession, 2020

Selkup is a critically endangered language on the verge of extinction. In their original ethnic territory, Selkup people are now in a minority position, the majority of the inhabitants is Russian-speaking. While statistical data show a slight increase in the number of people declaring themselves to be Selkup, the ratio of speakers is constantly decreasing. According to the latest official Russian census carried out in 2010 2 , there are only 3,527 people how claimed themselves ethnically Selkup. However, only about 29% of them are speaking one of the Selkup varieties. It must be mentioned that only 10-15 speakers are estimated for the Central and Southern Selkup dialects. Concerning the age of the speakers, Selkup is only spoken by the elderly and the language is no longer being passed on to the children. Selkup is a typical agglutinative language with dominant SOV word order, but pragmatic organization permits word order changes and under the influence of Russian, the word order can be changed into SVO. This language typically employing postpositions, there are no prepositions recorded, but the development of preverbs can be observed. The modifier always precedes the head. Selkup has a large inventory of cases; most scholars (among others Bekker at al. 1995, Kuznecova et al. 1980) distinguish 13 or 14 cases. The case inventory consists of three grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, and genitive) and at least four locational cases (e.g. lative, elative, locative, and prolative). There are two locative cases: the common locative (-qɨn/-qɨt), which is present in all dialects and the so-called locative-animate case (-nan), which is used only in the Central and Southern dialects. This latter case takes part/participates in the formulation of the possessive constructions (see Section 5.1.1.). Additionally, there are some minor cases such as dative, instrumental/comitative, translative, caritive, and coordinative. 3. Data in this study This is predominantly a corpus-based study, but occasionally I used data from existing grammatical and typological descriptions. Most of the examples are taken from the Selkup Language Corpus (SLC), which consists only already published texts from Northern, Central, and Southern dialects. 3 Actually, this corpus contains 127 morphologically glossed and further annotated texts with 6,512 sentences (38,738 tokens). The texts are from 35 different speakers. Additionally, I used some Northern Selkup examples which come from the Selkup Corpus compiled in the INEL-Project 4. This corpus contains 35 transcriptions with 1.021 sentences (5.514 tokens). The following tables shows the basic amount of the corpus materials.

Possession and ownership: A cross-linguistic typology ed. by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon

Language, 2014

This collection of essays about possession and ownership aims at combining linguistic and anthropological concepts concerning the relation between language, culture, and modes of thinking, particularly the ways in which culture and cognition are manifested in grammar. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald's opening essay, 'Possession and ownership: A cross-linguistic perspective', is a lucid introduction that defines, explains, and exemplifies all conceivable aspects of the topic. Chs. 2-11 address the ways that linguistic structures reflect cultural patterns, attitudes toward possession, and effects of change. Isabelle Bril analyzes the complex system of ownership relations in the Oceanic language Nêlêmwa of New Caledonia. Gloria J. Gravelle investigates patterns of possession in Moskona, an East Bird's Head language of West Papua, Indonesia. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald deals with possession and ownership in Manambu, a Ndu language of the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea. Alan Dench analyzes possession in Martuthunira, once spoken in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Lev Michael discusses Nanti, spoken in Peru, in the context of other Arawak languages. Mark W. Post deals with possession and association in the Tibeto-Burman Galo language and its culture. Yongxian Luo examines possessive constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Anne Storch studies possession in Hone, a Jukonoid language of Nigeria. Felix K. Ameka deals with possessive constructions in Likpe (Sɛkpɛlé), a Kwa language of Ghana. Zygmunt Frajzyngier discusses possession in Wandala, a Chadic language of Cameroon and Nigeria. The last two chapters focus on indigenous conceptualization of ownership and its changes in the modern world. Michael Wood discusses the Melanesian understanding of possession as observed in Kamula, spoken in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea. Rosita Henry deals with ownership among speakers of Temboka in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. With a special focus on Australian languages, especially Dyirbal, R. M. W. Dixon discusses comitative and privative patterns of predicative possession, the problem of the head in appositional constructions of inalienable possession, and indigenous concepts of possession, ownership, and control. In her introduction, Aikhenvald presents the theoretical principles of analysis and sums up a number of insights on the basis of her own studies, investigation of numerous grammars, and the findings suggested in the succeeding chapters. In the following, the main tenets of this detailed crosslinguistic account of the wide range of possessive structures is briefly outlined. Possessive constructions vary depending on the nature of the possessor, the possessee, and the possessive relationship. They realize a set of recurrent core meanings: (i) ownership, (ii) wholepart relations, for example, between a body or a plant and its parts, and (iii) kinship, that is, consanguineal and affinal relations. Many languages use essentially the same constructions for the core meanings. All combinations of the types are, however, found across the world's languages. The degree to which possession is conceived as 'the same' differs from one society to another and is reflected in linguistic structures. Possession can be expressed with possessive noun phrases. Some languages have dedicated phrase types that cover the core meanings (Moskona, Manambu, Martuthunira, Nanti, Hone). Others represent possessive meanings through more general associative noun phrases. The expression of possession may be viewed as a realization of a broader concept of association (Nêlêmwa, Galo, Mandarin, Likpe, Temboka, Wandala). Kinship possession and whole-part relationship reflect close links between possessor and possessee, the intimate relationship of 'inalienable possession'. Culturally important objects may fall 280 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 90, NUMBER 1 (2014)

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.

Possessive Constructions in the Obdorsk Dialect of the Khanty Language

Linguistica Uralica, 2018

The paper presents an analysis of the structural types of possessive constructions in the Obdorsk dialect of Khanty. It is shown that in this dialect the concept of possession is encoded by means of adnominal and predicative possessive constructions of differing structural types. Adnominal possessive constructions can be built according to five structural models with an explicit or implicit possessor, in four of which the head is marked with a possessive suffix. Predicative possessive constructions can be built with the verbs 'have', 'be', 'not to be' and 'remain'. The canonical possessive construction is transitive, with both the possessor and possessed uncoded. Predicative esse-constructions are less frequent and may incorporate a marked possessed.

Distributive Possessors in Swedish and Norwegian: Binding, Agreement, and Quantification

2019

The Scandinavian languages employ an unusual device for expressing distance distributivity: they make use of prenominal distributive possessors. These distributive elements appear, at least historically, to be composed of a distributive quantifier and a reflexive possessor. All Scandinavian languages have distributive possessors, but they display some interesting differences across language varieties. Two varieties from Norwegian and Swedish are specifically considered here. We outline similarities and differences between the distributive possessors having to do with agreement, (in-)definiteness, binding, and other linguistically significant properties. We suggest that their interpretive similarities follow from the assumption that they both have the semantics of Skolemized Choice Functions; this assumption makes sense of the fact that they are interpreted as indefinites and as bound variables. We furthermore argue that their main morphosyntactic differences boil down to whether the...

Possession and ownership : a cross-linguistic typology

2013

Possession and Ownership brings together linguists and anthropologists in a series of cross-linguistic explorations of expressions used to denote possession and ownership, concepts central to most if not all the varied cultures and ideologies of humankind. Possessive noun phrases can be broadly divided into three categories - ownership of property, whole-part relations (such as body and plant parts), and blood and affinal kinship relations. As Professor Aikhenvald shows in her extensive opening essay, the same possessive noun or pronoun phrase is used in English and in many other Indo-European languages to express possession of all three kinds - as in "Ann and her husband Henry live in the castle Henry's father built with his own hands" - but that this is by no means the case in all languages. In some, for example, the grammar expresses the inalienability of consanguineal kinship and sometimes also of sacred or treasured objects. Furthermore the degree to which possess...

Adnominal Possessive Constructions in Narym, Vasjugan and Middle-Ob Dialects of Selkup

Linguistica Uralica, 2017

The paper presents an analysis of the structural types of the adnominal possessive constructions in three little-studied Southern dialects of Selkup: Narym, Vasjugan and Middle-Ob. Apart from the other two types of possessive constructions (predicative and external) the adnominal possessive construction corresponds to a noun phrase involving a possessor (dependent) and a possessed (head). The possessor can be expressed by a noun or a pronoun, thus two types of adnominal possessive constructions (PNP) can be distinguished: nominal PNP and pronominal PNP. There are some approaches to marking possession in each type of the PNP in Selkup, which boil down to morphological or syntactic encoding. The locus of explicitly expressed markers encoding the possessive relation can either be on the head, on the dependent, on both or on neither of them in Southern Selkup.

On the origin(s) of the possessor doubling construction in Norwegian

In: Van der Liet, Henk & Muriel Norde (eds.) Language for its own sake. Essays on Language and Literature offered to Harry Perridon, 327-358. Amsterdam: Scandinavisch Instituut. (= Amsterdam Contributions to Scandinavian Studies 8)., 2012

Scandinavian languages and their dialects boast a wide array of posses-sive constructions, both prenominal and postnominal (see e.g. Delsing 2003a-b; Julien 2005). This paper focuses on the so-called possessor doubling construction in Norwegian, in which the possessor is fol-lowed by a ‘pleonastic’ reflexive possessive pronoun, as in "Kari sitt hus" 'Kari her (REFL) house'. The purpose of this paper will be to assess earlier claims about the emergence of possessor doubling in Norwegian, both as a single-source development (either external or internal) and as a multiple-source development, building on theoretical analyses of various per-suasions (e.g. Fiva 1987, Lødrup 1989, Julien 2005), as well as current theorizing about contact-induced grammatical change (e.g. Heine & Kuteva 2005).