Explaining alienability splits in the use of overt and zero possessive marking: a source-oriented approach

Abstract

AbstractA well-known pattern in the encoding of adnominal possession crosslinguistically involves splits in the use of overt and zero marking for alienable and inalienable possession. Overt marking may be restricted to alienable possession, but it is not usually restricted to inalienable possession. Zero marking may be restricted to inalienable possession, but it is not usually restricted to alienable possession. This has been explained in terms of principles pertaining to general properties of alienable and inalienable possession, such as the relative degree of conceptual contiguity between possessor and possessee or the relative need to disambiguate the possessive relation. These principles, however, have generally been formulated based on the synchronic crosslinguistic distribution of overt and zero marking across alienable and inalienable possession, rather than diachronic phenomena that shape this distribution from one language to another over time. This paper discusses several developmental processes that have been shown to recurrently give rise to the possessive markers involved in the alienability splits in question crosslinguistically. These markers develop through metonymization processes whereby various types of pre-existing elements take on a possessive meaning originally associated with their context of occurrence, independently of alienability. The distribution of these markers across alienable and inalienable possession follows from restrictions in the distribution of the source construction, unrelated to possession. Principles pertaining to alienability may possibly play a role in the extension, retention or loss of particular markers across alienable and inalienable possession contexts once they are in place in a language, thus ultimately contributing to the relative crosslinguistic frequency of particular alienability splits. This, however, remains to be investigated. These facts call for a new, source-oriented approach to alienability splits and recurrent crosslinguistic patterns in general. In this approach, individual patterns and their relative crosslinguistic frequency are explained in terms of the properties of multiple source constructions and diachronic phenomena that give rise to the pattern and shape its crosslinguistic distribution over time, rather than particular synchronic properties of the pattern in themselves.