Abstract
This article presents a new perspective on the derivational source for transitive verbs of possession. These are commonly postulated to be derived from a preposition expressing possession by incorporation of the preposition into an auxiliary. I reframe the contrast between prepositional and verbal expression of possession as an opposition between dependent and head marking of the possession relation, implemented syntactically as marking of either the specifier or the head of the projection encoding the possession relation. This conclusion is inferred from an investigation of Syrian Arabic showing that morphemes expressing possession alternate between a prepositional and a verbal use, but the verbal use does not involve incorporation of functional material. Evidence is presented that languages that show such incorporation, that is, where possession is expressed by a term of the form Aux+P, have passed through a diachronic stage similar to contemporary Syrian, where P functions as a verb in its own right. These considerations support the conclusion that transitive verbs of possession are derived not by preposition incorporation but by reanalysis of dependent marking as head marking, which may or may not feed incorporation.
Highlights
This article treats the typological relationship between languages with a transitive verb of possession, such as English, and languages that express possession through a preposition, such as Arabic
Il is obligatorily inflected and the DP indexed by the inflection occurs as syntactic subject. This means that the prepositional possessive use of la- had developed into the pseudoverb ilםAGR before its use as a marker of the continuous perfect developed, which in turn preceded the development of the incorporation structure for expressing possession in the nonpresent. If this diachronic trajectory is representative, transitive verbs of possession of the form AuxםP are not in the first instance derived by preposition incorporation; rather, they are derived by reanalysis of a preposition as a verb, that is, of dependent marking as head marking
This article has presented an extension of Boneh and Sichel’s (2010) analysis of prepositions in the expression of possession in Levantine Arabic that captures the pseudoverbal use of the same prepositions
Summary
This article treats the typological relationship between languages with a transitive verb of possession, such as English, and languages that express possession through a preposition, such as Arabic. Recent research on Maltese has shown that diachronically, the preposition already functioned as a verb before the incorporation structure arose (Camilleri 2019). This means that Maltese went through a diachronic stage identical to contemporary Syrian Arabic. These considerations point to the conclusion that preposition incorporation is not the pathway through which prepositions acquire a transitive verbal use. As dependent markers of the possession relation, they are subject to reanalysis as head markers This reanalysis sets the stage for incorporation of the derived verb into higher functional material, rather than being a result of it
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