Predicative Possession (Oxford Studies in Typology and by Leon Stassen PDF

By Leon Stassen

ISBN-10: 0199211655

ISBN-13: 9780199211654

This is often the 1st finished remedy of the suggestions hired within the world's languages to specific predicative ownership, as in "the boy has a bat". It provides the result of the author's fifteen-year examine venture at the topic. Predicative ownership is the resource of many grammaticalization paths - as within the English ideal stressful shaped from to have - and its typology is a vital key to figuring out the structural number of the world's languages and the way they modify. Drawing on facts from a few four hundred languages representing the entire world's language households, such a lot of which lack a detailed reminiscent of the verb to have, Professor Stassen goals (a) to set up a typology of 4 uncomplicated sorts of predicative ownership, (b) to find and describe the approaches through which commonplace structures will be converted, and (c) to discover hyperlinks among the typology of predicative ownership and different typologies to be able to display styles of interdependence. He exhibits, for instance, that the parameter of simultaneous sequencing - the best way a language officially encodes a chain like "John sang and Mary danced" - correlates with how it encodes predicative ownership. by way of this and different hyperlinks the writer units up a unmarried common version as a way to account for all morphosyntactic version in predicative ownership present in the languages of the realm, together with styles of edition over the years.
Predicative ownership will curiosity students and complex scholars of language typology, diachronic linguistics, morphology and syntax.

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Additional resources for Predicative Possession (Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory)

Example text

This motorcycle is John’s/ belongs to John (own data) In pragmatic or discourse-functional terms, the diVerence between the two sentences in (39) can be described as a contrast in the topicality of the two noun phrases involved. 21 In sentence (39b) it is the possessee NP which performs this function. In English possessive constructions, this diVerence in information structure is mirrored by a variety of lexical and morphosyntactic contrasts. First, the possessor NP has the grammatical function of subject in (39a), whereas the possessee NP is the subject in (39b).

That is, one tries to formulate and corroborate statements of the following general form: (57) If a language belongs to Type A in the typology at hand, it must have property X or, alternatively, (58) If a language has property X, it must belong to Type A in the typology at hand. The chapters in Part II of this book (Chapters 8–12) are devoted to the formulation of such implicational statements for the typology of predicative possession, and to an extensive exploration of their empirical validity.

2 DeWnite and indeWnite possession As a second restriction, I want to make it clear that, in this book, not all cases of predicative alienable possession will be included in the inquiry. As has already been tacitly implied in the previous section, predicative possession in a language like English can take two diVerent formal encodings, which might be labelled indefinite and definite predicative possession (Clasen 1981), depending on the marking of the possessee NP. The two variants can be illustrated by the following two contrasting constructions: (39) English (Indo-European, West Germanic) a.

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Predicative Possession (Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory) by Leon Stassen


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