Languages & Linguistics
Possessives
Possessives are grammatical forms that indicate ownership or association. In English, possessives are typically formed by adding an apostrophe and an "s" ('s) to the noun, or just an apostrophe after plural nouns ending in "s." Other languages may use different methods, such as inflections or separate possessive pronouns. Possessives are essential for expressing relationships and ownership in language.
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7 Key excerpts on "Possessives"
eBook - PDFArchaic Syntax in Indo-European
The Spread of Transitivity in Latin and French
- Brigitte Bauer(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Possession in Indo-European languages 161 As Seiler pointed out, however, the expression of possession in terms of existence in a number of languages does not imply ipso facto an underlying connection between possession and existence, let alone an underlying con-nection in all languages. Moreover, many languages do not express posses-sion in terms of location or existence, but even distinguish various types of possessive expressions, among them locatives. A number of African lan-guages, for example, distinguish ... between socially determined inher-ence (kin terms), partitive inherence (part/whole), and localizing inherence (operation in space). It is striking that the syntactic behavior of locative phrases differs in certain definite ways from that of both kin and part/whole expressions (Seiler 1983a:56). Whereas a number of languages display parallels between expressions of possession and existence, others introduce in their possessive construc-tions the notion of directionality, or definiteness and indefmiteness. Fi-nally, Sapir found in a number of American Indian languages that personal relation, possession, is primarily expressed by the possessive pronominal affixes of relationship terms (1917b:88). From this perspective the dis-tinction exclusive vs. inclusive possession is also pertinent: whereas my father, as mentioned earlier, conveys a relation between me and someone who can be someone else's father also, while the nominal phrase my car or my hat conveys pure and exclusive possession (1917b:88). These consid-erations account for the complex patterns in possessive marking of the various noun classes in these languages. This overview shows that although possession is a widespread phenom-enon and linguistically important feature, the notion itself as well as its expression present a significant variety cross-linguistically as well as in the individual languages.
eBook - PDF- Hero Janßen(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Joachim Tuschinsky The Lexical-Conceptual Structure of English Verbs of Possession 1. Introduction It has been noted in the literature again and again that possessive constructions, i.e. those with roughly the meaning of an entity X 'belonging to' an entity Υ in some sense 1 and those representing relations of place and direction, very often show a striking similarity in the way they express these concepts lexically and syntactically: 2 (1) a. U menja kniga. (Russian) 'at me book' Ί have a book.' b. Tha peann aig M iri. (Irish; Mackinnon 1971: 23) 'a pen is at at Mary' 'Mary has a pen.' c. Minulla on kirja. (Finnish; Anderson 1971: 107).) Ά book is on me.' d. The painting went to a Japanese bidder. All these sentences obviously make use of the inventory of local prepositions or verbs available in these languages to express possession. Furthermore, Lyons (1968: 392) points out that in both the Indo-European languages and in other languages with a verb to have the possessive use of the verb seems to have developed from sentences with a basic loca-tive meaning of this verb, paraphrasable as 'grasp' or 'hold (in the hand)' (cf. Latin habe-re). This means that even in cases where there is no overt parallelism of this sort a link can still be established diachronically. The fact that local verbs and prepositions play a central role in the way languages ex-press non-spatial semantic notions, even beyond the field of possession, has always been a central justification for localist semantic theories in the generative framework. Gruber (1965), the early seminal work in this respect, and, above all, Jackendoff (1972, 1976, 1983, 1987, 1990) argue that the lexical-semantic structures of many non-local verbs are extensions or reinterpretations of the basic semantics of motion and location.
eBook - PDF- Anna Giacalone Ramat(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Agreement by Suffixaufnahme , 3-110. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pustejovsky, James 1991 The generative lexicon. Computational Linguistics 17: 409-441. Seiler, Hansjakob 1983 Possession as an Operational Dimension of Language. Tübingen: Narr. Serzisko, Fritz 1984 Der Ausdruck der Possessivität im Somali. (Continuum -Schriftenreihe zur Linguistik 1.) Tübingen: Narr. Skiba, Romuald, and Norbert Dittmar 1992 Pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic constraints and grammaticali-zation: A longitudinal perspective. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 14: 323-349. Stolz, Thomas with Sabine Gorsemann forthc. Island possessions: Pronominal possession in Faroese and the pa-rameters of alienability/inalienability. Taylor, John R. 1996 Possessives in English. An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar. Ox-ford: Clarendon Press. Adnominal possession 179 Teleman, Ulf, Staffan Hellberg, and Erik Andersson 2000 Svenska Akademiens grammatik, Vol. 3: Fraser. [Grammar of the Swedish Academy. Vol. 3. Phrases.] Stockholm: Svenska Akademien & Norstedts ordbok. Ultan, Russell 1978 Towards a typology of substantival possession. In: Joseph Green-berg (ed.), Universals of Human Language , Vol. 4: Syntax , 11-50. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wijk-Andersson, Elsie 1993 Bestämda nominalfraser i inlärarsvenska. [Definite noun phrases in learner Swedish.] In: Anne Golden and Anne Hvenekilde (eds.), Nordens spräk som andrespräk, 191-197. Oslo: University of Oslo, Department of Linguistics.
eBook - PDF- Peter Siemund(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
This resemblance is also the reason for the assumption, often advanced in functionalist work, that possessive noun phrases are definite and therefore incompatible with (definite) arti-cles in languages such as English or German (* the my house ; * der mein Freund ) (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001). According to Haspelmath (1999), languages like German or English have grammaticalized the more fre-quent definite interpretation of possessive noun phrases, whereby the noun expressing the possessed entity is identified or “anchored” by the 2 We explicitly refer to Standard European Portuguese, since Brazilian Portu-guese shows a much higher degree of variability with respect to the use of possessive pronouns. 3 As shown in the example, Possessives may express all sorts of other relations that reach beyond the expression of “possession” in the strict sense (cf. Kop-tjevskaja-Tamm 2001: 961, 964; Langacker 1995: 56–57), e.g. the color of my car (property), my father (relatedness), the roof of the house (part-whole-relation), the animals of the desert (place), the newspaper of tomorrow (time), my thoughts , my professor . 4 The notion possessive pronoun is problematic in the context of Italian and Portuguese. In the generative tradition, for example, pronouns are generally classified as determiners (Radford 2004). We will therefore use the more neu-tral term possessive when we refer to the determiner/adjective and the abbre-viation PDP (possessive determiner phrase), when referring to the syntactic phrase as a whole (see also section 2.2, where we show that such noun phrases are headed by D°). 94 Tanja Kupisch and Esther Rinke possessor. If the possession is indefinite, more complex noun phrases are required (Ge. ein Freund von mir , En. a friend of mine ). Nevertheless, most languages with articles allow for the combination of article and possessive pronoun.
eBook - PDF- Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Similarly, Alexiadou (2005) surveys a number of languages, and concludes that there is considera-ble variation cross-linguistically in the relationship between the definiteness of a possessive and the definitness of its parts. Haspelmath (1999) considers article/ possessive complementarity from a cross-linguistic perspective, concluding that definiteness plays an important role. 5 Possessive compounds Possessives can sometimes be syntactically ambiguous: the men’s rooms can either refer to some rooms possessed by some salient group of men ([ the men ] ’s rooms ), or it can refer to some salient group of bathrooms ( the [ men’s rooms ]). In the latter 6 Possessives and relational nouns 193 case, men’s rooms forms a possessive noun-noun compound (Taylor 1996: chapter 11). Possessive compounds are moderately productive. Like other noun-noun com-pounds, established possessive compounds often take on idiomatic meanings (for instance, men’s room has an idiomatic meaning on which it means ‘bathroom’). When novel, like other noun-noun compounds, they require context to make their intended meaning recoverable, and they must describe some class of objects that are “nameworthy” (Downing 1977) given current conversational purposes. According to Barker (1995) and Taylor (1996), possessive compounds do not tolerate phrasal components. This means that adding adjectival modifiers or other phrase-level elements to either half of the compound disrupts posses-sive compounds. Thus [ the tall men ] ’s clean rooms can only have a structure on which the tall men is a constituent, and there is no idiomatic interpretation involving bathrooms. Munn (1995) and Strauss (2004) argue that this conclusion is mistaken, and the relevant constructions can be phrasal. Possessive compounds reveal a deep similarity between noun-noun com-pounds on the one hand, and phrasal Possessives on the other hand.
eBook - ePubThe Self, the Lord, and the Other according to Paul and Epictetus
The Theological Significance of Reflexive Language
- Michael J. Gorman(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Cascade Books(Publisher)
171 Other linguists, however, have attempted to analyze the semantic differences between sentences that are similar or identical in surface structure except that some employ reflexive pronouns and others do not. For example, they would ask, what is the semantic difference between “I love my [personal pronoun possessive] father” and “I love my own [reflexive pronoun possessive] father”? These linguists insist that the answer to this type of question depends on the particular language in which the statements are made, but studies of English, German, Slavic languages, and Latin have suggested a number of possibilities that may have more universal application.William Cantrall, in studies of English, German, and Latin, maintains that reflexive and non-reflexive prepositional and possessive constructions represent two different deep structures.172 These different deep structures, in turn, represent two distinct viewpoints, one objective, the other subjective. An objective observation, which does not report the subject’s perception, regularly employs a personal rather than a reflexive pronoun. A subjective affirmation, on the other hand, “where the antecedent of the reflexive is being asserted to be involved in the recognition of the coreference,” regularly employs a reflexive.173
eBook - PDF- Jacek Fisiak(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
12. The difference between adjectival-possessive and determiner-pos-sessive languages is regarded as parametric by some commentators. Giorgi — Langobardi (forthcoming), for instance, regarding Possessives as genitives NPs at D-structure, posit that an open parameter of Universal Grammar allows them to surface either as adjectives or as determiners. 4 Lyons (1986) goes further, claiming that an adjectival-possessive language must use an overt definite marker in specifier position, to constitute a definite NP, 5 whereas in determiner-possessive languages the possessive specifier itself carries definite interpretation. For him, definiteness is configurationally determined — the structural position of specifier within the NP is interpreted as definite. Thus r il mio libro and r mon livre 1 are interpreted as definite NPs because the specifier slot is filled by Γ ΐΓ and r morP respectively. 13. Whether indeed r mon livre 1 is an inherently definite NP is open to doubt (cf. Posner 1988). In modern French the question of definite- Parametric changes and Romance Possessives 341 ness is complicated by the semantic ambivalence of the definite article C/e 1 ), which is not unambiguously a signal of specificity (cf. its use with abstracts — le silence, or with inherently specific referents — La France). It does mark a certain degree of familiarity with its referent (or, in pragmatic terms, accessibility — cf. Ariel 1988 — within a shared framework of thought as well as in the situational or discourse context). For most French grammarians (following Guillaume 1919), it is the most generalising of the determinants or discriminants , which serve to insert a concept into a specific discourse by limiting its potential extension (cf., e. g., Grevisse 1986: 906; Chevalier et al. 1964: 213; Valin et al. 1985: 61 —62). The role of the possessive may however be a quantifying rather than a generalising one, akin to the indefinite as well as to the definite article.
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