Predicative possession in Permic. (preprint) (original) (raw)

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.