Possessives and grammaticalization in Romance

Abstract

As is well known, the possessive paradigms of French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian contain three types of possessive: adjectives, determiners and pronouns. Comparing with the Latin system, from which all Romance possessive systems derive, two tendencies prevail: possessive pronouns tend to be eliminated, and possessive adjectives change into determiners or become defictive adjectives with a restricted distribution. However, the possessive system of each of these four languages appears to be different. The aim of the article is to examine the extent to which these differences are the result of different degrees of grammaticalization. We show that the possessive system in French is in the lead in terms of grammaticalization in that neither of its two paradigms any longer displays adjectival properties. The least grammaticalized system is the Italian, while Spanish and Romanian occupy intermediate positions: Spanish combines the French system of clitic forms with the Italian system of strong forms. As for Romanian, the dependence of the possessive form on the definite article or its substitute AL shows that it is more grammaticalized than the Italian possessive system.