Alienable/Inalienable Possession: From Syntax to Semantics

Language sciences, 2000

Cognitive Linguistic Studies, 2024

The study aims to examine the syntactic and semantic behaviors of predicative possession (i.e., have-possessive constructions) in Malwai Punjabi, an underdocumented dialect within the Indo-Aryan language family. Data were collected from longitudinal online interviews with native speakers as consultants, with audio recordings for transcribed target sentences. The results revealed that all the alienable possession, either permanent/temporary or abstract/concrete, could be marked by the postposition koḷ 'near/with' , whereas inalienable possession, such as wholepart relation and kinship, could not be encoded using koḷ. The prototypicality model and schema-based metaphors explained why koḷ was widely used to express alienable possession in Malwai Punjabi. The analysis of companion and proximity schemata also justified the extended semantics of predicative possession, suggesting a metaphorical mapping of accompaniment and location onto possession. From a typological angle, the case study can not only provide further evidence for the existence of split possession but also contribute to a cognitive understanding of predicative possession in relation to other languages.

Cognitive Linguistics, 2011

Oceanic languages typically make a grammatical contrast between expressions of alienable and inalienable possession. Moreover, further distinctions are made in the alienable category but not in the inalienable category. The present research tests the hypothesis that there is a good motivation for such a development in the former case. As English does not have a grammaticalized distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, it provides a good testing ground. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants were asked to write down the first interpretation that came to mind for possessive phrases, some of which contained inherently relational possessums, while others contained possessums that are not inherently relational. Phrases with non-relational possessums elicited a broader range of interpretations and a lower consistency of a given interpretation across possessor modifiers than those with relational possessums. Study 2 demonstrated that users assign a default interpretation to a possessive phrase containing a relational possessum even when another reading is plausible. Study 3, a corpus-based analysis of possessive phrase use, showed that phrases with relational possessums have a narrower range of interpretations than those with other possessums. Taken together, the findings strongly suggest that grammatical distinctions between different types of alienable possession are motivated.

Lingua, 2016

This paper investigates the use of possessive morphosyntax to express modal necessity, as in the English use of have to. We claim that possessive modality constructions arise because both possession and necessity express a relation of inclusion between two arguments of the same semantic type: possession involves a relation of inclusion between two ⟨e⟩-type arguments, while necessity involves inclusion between sets of worlds. Differences between the two arise from their different syntax: possessive have expresses possession via syntactic transitivity, while modals conceal one argument within the modal head. The similarities and differences are captured within a realizational approach to morphology, in which vocabulary items like have and must are inserted to spell out structures consisting of formal features. The proposal is then extended from have-possession languages such as English to be-possession languages, focusing on possessive modality in Hindi-Urdu and Bengali. We argue that the possessive/modal head can be "applicative-like," licensing oblique case on an argument that raises to its specifier. This account explains why possessive morphosyntax uniformly is used to express modal necessity, and not other modal meanings: the universal force of elements like have (to) follows from the inclusion relation expressed by possession. Possessive modality thus sheds light not only on the semantics of possession but also on the compositional syntax of modal operators.

This report discusses grammatical possession in ten languages. In terms of genetic affiliation, they span nine language families: Sino-Tibetan (Hokkien and Mandarin), Indo-European (English), Afro-Asiatic (Dime), Niger-Congo (Tafi), Austronesian (Ughele), Trans-New Guinea (Klon), Uto-Aztecan (Cupeño), Chapacuran (Wariˈ) and language isolate (Movima). In terms of geographical origin, they range eight continental regions: Northern America (Cupeño), Southern America (Wariˈ and Movima), Northern Europe (English), Western Africa (Tafi), Eastern Africa (Dime), Eastern Asia (Hokkien and Mandarin), South-Eastern Asia (Klon) and Melanesia (Ughele). The sample languages were selected principally for their genetic distinctness, and additionally for their geographical spread globally. With the exception of Hokkien and Mandarin, all sample languages come from different language families, and have no significant history of mutual contact.

Language, 2014

This collection of essays about possession and ownership aims at combining linguistic and anthropological concepts concerning the relation between language, culture, and modes of thinking, particularly the ways in which culture and cognition are manifested in grammar. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald's opening essay, 'Possession and ownership: A cross-linguistic perspective', is a lucid introduction that defines, explains, and exemplifies all conceivable aspects of the topic. Chs. 2-11 address the ways that linguistic structures reflect cultural patterns, attitudes toward possession, and effects of change. Isabelle Bril analyzes the complex system of ownership relations in the Oceanic language Nêlêmwa of New Caledonia. Gloria J. Gravelle investigates patterns of possession in Moskona, an East Bird's Head language of West Papua, Indonesia. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald deals with possession and ownership in Manambu, a Ndu language of the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea. Alan Dench analyzes possession in Martuthunira, once spoken in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Lev Michael discusses Nanti, spoken in Peru, in the context of other Arawak languages. Mark W. Post deals with possession and association in the Tibeto-Burman Galo language and its culture. Yongxian Luo examines possessive constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Anne Storch studies possession in Hone, a Jukonoid language of Nigeria. Felix K. Ameka deals with possessive constructions in Likpe (Sɛkpɛlé), a Kwa language of Ghana. Zygmunt Frajzyngier discusses possession in Wandala, a Chadic language of Cameroon and Nigeria. The last two chapters focus on indigenous conceptualization of ownership and its changes in the modern world. Michael Wood discusses the Melanesian understanding of possession as observed in Kamula, spoken in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea. Rosita Henry deals with ownership among speakers of Temboka in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. With a special focus on Australian languages, especially Dyirbal, R. M. W. Dixon discusses comitative and privative patterns of predicative possession, the problem of the head in appositional constructions of inalienable possession, and indigenous concepts of possession, ownership, and control. In her introduction, Aikhenvald presents the theoretical principles of analysis and sums up a number of insights on the basis of her own studies, investigation of numerous grammars, and the findings suggested in the succeeding chapters. In the following, the main tenets of this detailed crosslinguistic account of the wide range of possessive structures is briefly outlined. Possessive constructions vary depending on the nature of the possessor, the possessee, and the possessive relationship. They realize a set of recurrent core meanings: (i) ownership, (ii) wholepart relations, for example, between a body or a plant and its parts, and (iii) kinship, that is, consanguineal and affinal relations. Many languages use essentially the same constructions for the core meanings. All combinations of the types are, however, found across the world's languages. The degree to which possession is conceived as 'the same' differs from one society to another and is reflected in linguistic structures. Possession can be expressed with possessive noun phrases. Some languages have dedicated phrase types that cover the core meanings (Moskona, Manambu, Martuthunira, Nanti, Hone). Others represent possessive meanings through more general associative noun phrases. The expression of possession may be viewed as a realization of a broader concept of association (Nêlêmwa, Galo, Mandarin, Likpe, Temboka, Wandala). Kinship possession and whole-part relationship reflect close links between possessor and possessee, the intimate relationship of 'inalienable possession'. Culturally important objects may fall 280 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 90, NUMBER 1 (2014)

This essay analyses the grammatical category of inalienable possession by examining the interaction of morphosyntatic forms, semantic features, pragmatic functions, and discourse frequencies. Using data from Q’eqchi’-Maya, it is argued that inalienable possession may be motivated relative to two dimensions: (1) whatever any person is strongly presumed to possess (identifiability); (2) whatever such personal possessions are referred to frequently (relevance). In regards to frequency, inalienable possessions are compared with possessed NPs, and possessed NPs are compared with all NPs, in regards to grammatical relation, information status, animacy rank, and semantic role. In regards to identifiability, it is argued that inalienable possessions are like deictics and prepositions in that they guide the addressee’s identification of a referent by encoding that referent’s relation to a ground; and inalienable possessions are different from deictics and prepositions in that the ground is a person and the referents are its parts or relations.

Unison in multiplicity: Cognitive and typological perspectives on grammar and lexis. CogniTextes Vol. 4, 2010

Verbs of possession such as HAVE and GIVE have been extensively studied both typologically and from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The present study presents an analysis of possession verbs as a semantic field with a focus on the most basic verbs. It combines a corpus-based contrastive analysis with a sketch of a general lexical typology of possession verbs. The contrastive part consists of an analysis primarily of the Swedish verbs ge 'give', få 'get' and ta 'take' and their correspondents in some genetically and/or areally related languages. Data are taken from two translation corpora, the large English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and the Multilingual Pilot Corpus (MPC) consisting of extracts from Swedish novels and their published translations into English, German, French and Finnish. The study of ta is concerned in particular with the relation between the many concrete uses of the verb, which are based on the interpretation of taking as a goal-directed action sequence. The account of Swedish ge 'give' and få 'get' are brief summaries of earlier studies concerned with patterns of polysemy and grammaticalization. In particular the verb få 'get' has a complex and relatively language-specific such pattern including modal, aspectual and causative grammatical meanings. The meanings GIVE, TAKE, GET and HAVE are all realized as verbs with very high frequency in the Germanic languages. This appears to be a rather language-specific characteristic. The typological part presents a tentative typology and gives a brief overview of some of the ways in which the corresponding meanings are realized in languages that are not included in the corpus.

CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - Zenodo, 2022

The discussion on predicative possession is actually a fairly broad discussion. The aspect studied in this paper is looking at the construction of ownership verbs in the English possession predicate. Viewed from the point of view of the study this paper is grouped into language studies in terms of syntax. The method used is descriptive qualitative method. The theory in this paper refers to the theory of Quirk (1973), Halliday (1985), Cook (1989), and Jackendoff (1977). The data used in this paper are taken from The British National Corpus (http://www.notcorp.ox.ac.uk/). The data collected contains sentences with the predicate of ownership in English with the verb "have", "own", "possess", and "belong to". From the results of research on the predicative possession in English, it can be concluded as follows. Lingual elements that can fill the possession predicate are a) The "have" possession predicate, which consists of several patterns as follows: active pattern (S+V+O), (S+V+O+A), (S+V+O+OC), and (S+V+O+OC+A); b) The "own" possession predicate consists on the following patterns: active sentence patterns (S+V+O), (S+V+O+A), (S+V+O+OC), and (S+V+O+OC+A) and passive sentence patterns with patterns (S+V+O), (S+V+O+A), (S+V+O+OC) and (S+V+O+OC+A) c) The "possess" possession predicate consists on several patterns as follows: active pattern (S+V+O), (S+V+O+A), (S+V+O+OC) dan (S+ V+O+OC+A); d). The "belong to" possession predicate consists of the following patterns: Active sentences (S+V+O), (S+V+O+A), (S+V+O+OC), and (S+V+O+OC +A).