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 “Have”-possessives, which originated from “action schema”, are argued to have superseded the archaic “be”-possessives, which trigger a non-canonical marking of the possessor argument.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.
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.
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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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Predicative possession across Western Iranian languages
- Nasality in Dagbani prosody
- Variable D-marking on proper naming expressions: A typological study
- Dogon reported discourse markers: The Ben Tey quotative topicalizer
- Spanish [auto + V + se] constructions
- Datives with psych nouns and adjectives in Basque
- Folklore as an evidential category
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Predicative possession across Western Iranian languages
- Nasality in Dagbani prosody
- Variable D-marking on proper naming expressions: A typological study
- Dogon reported discourse markers: The Ben Tey quotative topicalizer
- Spanish [auto + V + se] constructions
- Datives with psych nouns and adjectives in Basque
- Folklore as an evidential category