The Dutch anaphoric possessive construction (APC), as exemplified by Tom zijn fiets ‘Tom his bike’, shows a peculiar mix of regularity and idiosyncracy. The article provides a theory-neutral ...description of its properties and quantitative information about its use in two treebanks, one of spoken Dutch (CGN) and one of written Dutch (Lassy Small). It argues that the APC has a right branching structure and models it in the framework of Constructional Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The latter’s organization of constructions in terms of a finegrained hierarchy of phrase types is shown to provide the means to capture both what the APC has in common with other possessive constructions and what is idiosyncratic of it.
Like many other Oceanic and Kanak languages of New Caledonia, Zuanga-Yuanga ZY has classifiers restricted to the possession of nouns denoting food, drink, animals and plants; it also has dichotomous ...direct and indirect adnominal possessive constructions, which are generally labeled inalienable or alienable in the Oceanic literature. These terms refer to a distinction between close versus distant structural marking, which do not strictly correlate with lexical-semantic categories. For instance, kinship nouns are split over the two types of constructions, distinguishing reference from address kinship terms, not in terms of semantic distinctions between close versus distant kinship types. The split for body-part nouns is between directly possessed dedicated terms and indirectly possessed metaphorical body terms, not in terms of permanent versus removable parts, or temporary body properties. In ZY possessive constructions correlate with fairly strict possessee noun classes belonging to one single structural class (directly or indirectly marked). Only a limited number of nouns denoting parts-of-whole have alternate constructions expressing different semantic relations to the possessed noun.
The area between the Wallace Line and Lydekker’s Line in eastern Indonesia and East Timor has long been recognized as a transitional zone between the flora and fauna of Asia and Oceania. More ...recently, Linguistic Wallacea, shifted slightly eastward from Biological Wallacea, has been established as a transitional zone between the Southeast Asian and Melanesian linguistic types. This volume focuses on grammatical systems of possession in Linguistic Wallacea, discussing both Austronesian and Papuan languages of the region. Typical traits include Possessor–Possessum word order and alienability contrasts, among others. The cross-familial distribution of these features suggests longstanding language contact throughout the area with borrowing both from Papuan languages into Austronesian ones and vice versa.
We investigated structural priming in adult native speakers, focusing on possessive constructions in German, where the two alternative structures involved differ in frequency. According to ...error-based learning approaches to priming, the less frequent structure should lead to a larger prediction error and larger priming effects than the more frequent structure. In a comparison of preferences during a pretest and preferences during priming, we did not find evidence of such an inverse preference effect. Moreover, during priming, we observed increasing production rates of the preferred structure, hence, a cumulative priming effect. In line with hybrid models of priming, we propose that two mechanisms, namely, a mechanism learning from input as well as a mechanism accumulating activation during comprehension and production, are involved in the temporal development of priming effects. Moreover, we suggest that the interaction of the two mechanisms may depend on prior experience with the alternative structures.
This study aims to describe characteristics of the relationship between the possessor and the possessed in Indonesian possessive constructions in letters to the editor. Theresearch data were ...sentences with possessive constructions collected from letters to theeditor in Kedaulatan Rakyat and Kompas daily newspapers in 2015. The data were collectedby reading and noting and were analyzed by means of the distributional method todetermine the possessive constructions and the correspondence method to determinethe relationships between the possessor and the possessed. The findings are as follows.First, the possessive constructions in letters to the editor are in the form of noun phraseswith two types of constructions, namely (1) Common Noun + Personal Pronoun, and (2)Common Noun + Proper Noun. Second, there are two types of relationships betweenthe possessor and the possessed in the possessive constructions, namely the kinshipand ownership relationships. The relationships can be categorized into two possessiverelationships, namely the lexical/inherent possessive relationship (kinship relationship)and the extrinsic possessive relationship (ownership relationship).
This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of adjectives in Dzongkha, a Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) language spoken in Bhutan. Several syntactic and morphological properties serve to ...differentiate adjectives from other word classes. Syntactic properties include the ability of adjectives to directly modify the head noun in a noun phrase (NP), to be modified by an intensifier in the copula complement function, and to serve as the parameter of comparison in comparative constructions. They also include the inability of adjectives to form a complete NP or an intransitive predicate, to function as the possessor and the possessed in possessive constructions, and to occur in cleft-focus constructions. Morphological properties include comparative and superlative markings, as well as the inability of adjectives to take the markers of grammatical categories typically associated with verbs, such as tense, aspect, modality, causative derivation, imperative mood, and negation; or the markers of grammatical categories typically associated with nouns, such as gender, augmentative and diminutive, and case and number. This study is anticipated to cast light on the status of adjectives in other closely related Trans-Himalayan languages.
Les articles rassemblés dans ce recueil traitent de l’expression des valeurs existentielles dans différentes langues du monde. Le caractère universel de la problématique et sa richesse sont illustrés ...par la diversité des approches théoriques permettant de constater des similitudes et des différences dans son expression d’une langue à l’autre. L’originalité de l’ouvrage ne réside pas seulement dans la description de la variété des structures existentielles, porteuses de valeurs possessives, locatives ou attributives, elle consiste également dans leur lecture multiple. La structure du recueil a été arbitrairement organisée en deux parties. Dans les articles de la première partie, la prédication existentielle est envisagée d’un point de vue typologique, dans ceux de la deuxième partie, c’est une démarche énonciative et pragmatique qui est appliquée. Cette répartition est toutefois quelque peu artificielle, dans la mesure où les auteurs envisagent les traits sémantiques, syntaxiques et formels des constructions existentielles mais tiennent également compte des paramètres contextuels et, pour certains articles, énonciatifs. La prédication existentielle est, en effet, présentée par les auteurs comme une opération spécifique de repérage d’un terme par rapport à l’autre qui se répercute sur le marquage non canonique des constituants propositionnels, ainsi que par l’emploi des marqueurs d’existence spécifiques. L’analyse typologique et l’approche énonciative se complètent et ouvrent de nouvelles perspectives dans la recherche linguistique sur l’expression de l’existence dans les langues du monde.
This paper discusses morphological, phonological, semantic and syntactic properties of compound formation in Karachay-Balkar with a special focus on Noun-Noun compounds which surface with or without ...marker –sI and sheds new light on compound formation in Turkish. In line with Öztürk and Taylan (2016), we suggest that –sI signals the presence of an argument being the head of functional head nP. Karachay-Balkar is more restrictive than Turkish in that –sI surfaces only with nouns that are inherently transitive. In this paper we also focus on the function of –sI in genitive possessive constructions. Drawing on compounds in Karachay-Balkar and Turkish, we conclude that although –sI introduces an argument in both genitive possessive constructions and compounds, what appears on the head noun in genitive possessive constructions is possessive agreement marker on a par with first and second person agreement markers.
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