Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo
Giovanni Roversi
February 2024 

This paper argues that possession is syntactically a category-flexible notion. While it’s clear that in many languages possession is mostly grounded and operates in the nominal extended projection (Szabolcsi 1983, Kayne 1993), I show that this cannot be universal. The empirical part of this article is a case study of Äiwoo, which I argue has an inherently verbal counterpart of English ’s, an abstract transitive verb I label POSS. This verb can be used by itself to form clausal possession: “I POSS the boat” ≈ “the boat is mine”. Possessed DPs also contain the verb POSS: the object of this verb is extracted, forming a relative clause. Informally described, “my boat” really is “the boat_i [that I POSS __i]” ≈ “the boat that is mine”. Given this, Äiwoo simply lacks true nominal possessives. The theoretical consequence is that possession can be mapped onto different syntactic categories in different languages. This is a welcome result, as it makes the syntax-semantics mapping as flexible as it needs to be: if possession is just a tool to assert that a certain relation holds between two entities, nothing in our theory of grammar predicts that such a notion should only be limited to a specific syntactic category.

Edit log: v4 is a revised-and-resubmitted, considerably shorter and tightened version of the original manuscript.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006565 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Accepted at Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
keywords:	possession, oceanic, austronesian, voice, agreement, have, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v5 [December 2023] v4 [December 2023] v3 [December 2022] v2 [April 2022] v1 [April 2022]
Downloaded:	1673 times

 

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