The Role of Information Structure in Czech Possessive Constructions

Abstract

The paper investigates the expression and functional properties of possessive constructions in Czech. The main target of the presentation is to compare semantics and pragmatics of two types of possessive constructions: the internal possessor (IP, attributive possessor) and the external possessor (EP) constructions. More specifically, I will examine the functional properties of the distinct possessor forms (IP vs. EP) in terms of frequency, semantic roles and information structure. Based on the data from the Czech National Corpus (Syn2000, Syn2005, Syn2010) I claim that the actual usage of one or the other possessor type in Czech is not only determined by specific semantic and pragmatic features of constructional elements, ie. the predicate, the PR and the PM (cf. Haspelmath 1999, Fried 2009), but it is also related to the information status of the PR. The EP construction (terminology based on Payne & Barshi 1999) is a cross-linguistically attested type of construction in which the possessor (PR) and the possessum (PM, nominal possessed by the possessor) do not form a single noun phrase constituent (1a, 2a), opposed to the IP construction (1b, 2b) with the direct syntactic relation between the PR and the PM.