Possession (Linguistic)

Abstract

In linguistics, possession is conceived as a relationship of appurtenance between a possessor and a possessed ( possessum, possessee) for which there are specific paradigms of expression in the languages of the world. On the conceptual side, this relationship of appurtenance ranges from material possession via kinship and body-part relationships to the domain of abstract relations (someone's ideas, someone's activities, etc.). On the formal side, one distinguishes mainly between attributive possession (e.g., ‘my house,’ ‘the man's house’) and predicative possession (‘the house is mine,’ ‘the house belongs to me,’ ‘I have a house’). However, it is not always easy to distinguish the conceptual domain of possession from other cognitive domains, and also on the formal side there is a continuum of expression rather than some strictly defined set of constructions. Especially in the area of inalienable possession (body parts, kinship relations) one often finds peculiar constructions where the possessor of body parts is ‘raised’ to become an argument of the verb as in ‘he hit me on the head’ vs. ‘he hit on my head.’ Generally speaking, the proper understanding of linguistic possession includes matters of the relative discourse prominence of possessor and possessum in the vent described, depending on criteria like animacy, egocentricity, etc.