The Spanish doubled possessive construction from a cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a cross-linguistic analysis of the Old and American Spanish doubled possessive construction, in which the possessor is doubly marked in a nominal phrase by means of both a third person prenominal possessive pronoun and a prepositional possessive phrase (su casa de Juan ‘lit. his house of John’). This construction is contrasted, in particular, with the French clitic possessive doubling construction (son livre à lui ‘lit. his book to him’) and the Germanic possessor doubling construction (dem Vater seine Katze ‘lit. the father his cat’), showing that the properties of the Spanish structure significantly differ from those of the French and Germanic patterns. A previous view of its typological status whereby the Spanish construction is related to the formal expression of inalienable possession in other languages is further critically discussed, and it is proposed instead that the prenominal possessive in the Spanish doubled possessive construction belongs to the class of evaluative possessives.