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Predicative possession across Western Iranian languages

  • Masoud Mohammadirad ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 6, 2020
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Abstract

This paper offers a first systematic investigation of predicative possessive constructions across Western Iranian languages. The notion of possession is conceived as a prototypical domain. It is shown that investigated languages are classified into two major areally distributed groups with respect to predicative possessive constructions: (i) “be”-verb languages, (ii) “have”-verb languages. “Have”-possessives, which originated from “action schema”, are argued to have superseded the archaic “be”-possessives, which trigger a non-canonical marking of the possessor argument. However, “have”-verb languages have preserved relics of the older “be”-possessive in some neighbouring domains to possession. In addition, two languages exhibit possession split and are in transition from “be”-possession to “have”-possession: these languages demonstrate the effect of alienability/inalienability in such a split.


Corresponding author: Masoud Mohammadirad, Centre de Recherche sur le Monde Iranien (UMR 8041), University of Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 27 rue Paul Bert, 94200, Ivry-sur-Seine, France, E-mail:

Funding source: European Union’s Horizon 2020 research

Funding source: Marie Skłodowska-Curie

Award Identifier / Grant number: 665850

Abbreviations
acc

accusative

add

additive

adv

adverb

clf

classifier

cop

copula

dat

dative

def

definite

dem

demonstrative

dim

diminutive

dir

direct

ez

ezafeh

f

feminine

gen

genitive

ind

indicative

indf

indefinite

intj

interjection

intr

intransitive

ipfv

imperfective

m

masculine

mid

middle

neg

negative

nom

nominative

obl

oblique

pl

plural

pn

proper noun

prs

present

pst

past

ptc

particle

ptcp

participle

punct

punctual

sg

singular

Acknowledgement

A first version of this paper was presented at the 52nd annual meeting of Societas Linguistica Europaea in Leipzig, 2019. I thank the audience for their comments and criticisms. I am especially indebted to Geoffrey Haig for his rich feedback on the earlier versions of this paper. In addition, the reviewers’ and editors’ comments were very insightful and greatly improved the paper. Last but not least, I am grateful to Emmanuel Giraudet from the research group ‘Monde Iranien et indien’, for the creation of maps. Any remaining shortcomings are, of course, my sole responsibility.

  1. Funding: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 665850.

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Received: 2019-09-14
Revised: 2019-12-15
Revised: 2020-01-04
Accepted: 2020-01-19
Published Online: 2020-11-06
Published in Print: 2020-09-25

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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