Inalienable possession in locational constructions

Abstract

In Broekhuis and Cornips (1995), it has been argued that Standard Dutch inalienable possession constructions such as (la) and (lb) have the same underlying structure in (2a): (la) is derived by means of an obligatory movement of the predicate of the BIJ-phrase into the specifier of the locational PP, as in (2b); (lb), in its turn, is derived from the structure in (2b) by incorporation of the functor BIJ into the verb, as a result of which the NP is assigned dative Case. This analysis of the examples in (1) is consistent with Hoekstra's (1994) hypothesis according to which inalienable possession is syntactically encoded by means of a functor P {BIJ in this case) that takes the possessor as its internal and the possessum as its external argument: [sc [NP Possessum][P [NP Possessor]].