Predicative Possession

by Leon Stassen

Overview

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the strategies employed in the world's languages to express predicative possession, as in "the boy has a bat". It presents the results of the author's fifteen-year research project on the subject. Predicative possession is the source of many grammaticalization paths - as in the English perfect tense formed from to have - and its typology is an important key to understanding the structural variety of the world's languages and how they change. Drawing on data from some 400 languages representing all the world's language families, most of which lack a close equivalent to the verb to have, Professor Stassen aims (a) to establish a typology of four basic types of predicative possession, (b) to discover and describe the processes by which standard constructions can be modified, and (c) to explore links between the typology of predicative possession and other typologies in order to reveal patterns of interdependence. He shows, for example, that the parameter of simultaneous sequencing - the way a language formally encodes a sequence like "John sang and Mary danced" - correlates with the way it encodes predicative possession. By means of this and other links the author sets up a single universal model in order to account for all morphosyntactic variation in predicative possession found in the languages of the world, including patterns of variation over time.

Predicative Possession will interest scholars and advanced students of language typology, diachronic linguistics, morphology and syntax.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199211654
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2009
Series:	Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory
Pages:	832
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Leon Stassen is Senior Lecturer in General Linguistics at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, and Professor of Language Typology at the University of Utrecht. He is the author of Instransitive Predication (OUP 1997).

Table of Contents

Part One: The Typology of Predicative Possession1. The Domain of the Inquiry2. Four Basic Types of Predicative Possession3. Non-Standard Variants4. Adnominalization5. Predicativization6. Transitivization7. SummaryPart Two: Determinant Factors8. In Search of Determinant Factors9. Locational Possessives10. With-Possessives11. Topic Possessives12. Have-PossessivesPart Three: A Model of Predicative Possession Encoding13. A Model of predicative Possession EncodingNotesAppendixReferencesIndex of SubjectsIndex of Languages