External Possessor Constructions Research Articles

What Did(n’t) Happen to English?: A Re-evaluation of Some Contact Explanations in Early English

McWhorter (2002) argued that contact with Norse caused simplifications in English grammar that set English apart from other Germanic languages. This paper focuses on one of the losses McWhorter attributed to the linguistic impact of the Scandinavian invasions, External Possessors. An investigation of electronic Old and Early Middle English corpora reveals that the construction was already on the decline in the Old English period, and that Norse contact cannot explain the Early Middle English data. There is no support for the view that the loss of the construction spread from the Scandinavianized areas southwards. The facts are consistent with the view that while Celtic influence did not cause the loss of the construction in Old English, Celtic speakers shifting to English may have played a role in triggering the initial decline of the construction. Study of non-standard variants of other Germanic languages is needed to increase our understanding of the history of External Possessor constructions in those languages.

External possession of body-part nouns in Jumjum: Possessor raising with possessum incorporation

Abstract In Jumjum, a Western Nilotic language, some body-part nouns, and only such nouns, may be externally possessed in transitive and antipassive clauses. In these external possessor constructions, the possessor is either the object of a transitive verb or the demoted patient of an antipassive verb. The externally possessed body-part noun is partly incorporated into the verb, as shown by the following properties: It immediately follows the verb, its tone is determined by the final tone of the verb, it may combine with a nominalized verb in a kind of compound, and it does not exhibit the root-final nasalization that is prevalent in monosyllabic singular nouns in Jumjum, including internally possessed body-part nouns.

Discontinuous constituents or independent constructions?

In many formal theories of grammar, pairs of expressions such as the active and the passive are treated as variants of each other — the passive typically being a secondary construction derived from the active by operations that change the syntactic structure. Recent accounts based on Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar have questioned the validity of such an analysis, arguing that these “variants” are actually independent constructions with their own usage conditions and meaning. An important piece of evidence comes from so-called split constituents, discussed by Croft (2001: 191), who argues that expressions like A guy who I hadn’t seen since high school came in vs. A guy came in who I hadn’t seen since high school differ in their grammatical structure and usage. In this paper we discuss the Finnish split genitive construction where the assumed genitive modifier is separated from its head by intervening material, typically the finite verb. In many respects, the split genitive resembles constructions of external possession, but its range of usage is relatively limited, and in the grammatical system of Finnish it can be seen in an intermediate position between adnominal genitive constructions, on the one hand, and productive external possessor constructions based on local cases, on the other hand. Traditionally, the split genitive has been taken to be a discontinuous variant of a contiguous NP where the genitive is positioned next to its head. However, this study shows that the two constructions differ in pragmatic, semantic and grammatical terms. The split genitive construction is more limited in its usage, and it serves more specific semantic functions such as the topicalization of the genitive-marked element that carries the role of an experiencer. As in many external possessor constructions cross-linguistically, these constraints restrict the types of genitive modifiers that are available in the split genitive construction.

Introduction: The pace of grammaticalization in a typological perspective

A grammaticalization process, by which an item shifts from lexicon to grammar, is by definition a cline or a continuum. Consequently, items undergoing grammaticalization processes can occupy different positions on the cline between its two extremes. The main claim we want to argue for in this thematic issue is that the same idea of gradation can be extended to language typology, by showing that, within a language family, comparable grammaticalization phenomena can be at the outset or on-going in one language and have reached a stage further down the cline in another language, or even that grammaticalization phenomena present in one language may be absent in the other one. Thus, with respect to Romance, several authors, such as Boysen (1966), Delattre (1966), Harris (1978), Posner (1996), Lamiroy (1999 and 2003), Marchello-Nizia (2006), Detges (2006), Carlier (2007) and Lindschouw (2010, 2011), have pointed out that for the majority of grammaticalization phenomena, French is further on the cline than the other Romance languages. Research on several independent domains, viz. word order (Marchello-Nizia 1995), prepositions (Lamiroy 2001), external possessor constructions (Lamiroy 2003), existential sentences (Meulleman, forthc.), tense, mood, demonstratives, auxiliaries (Lamiroy & De Mulder 2011 and De Mulder & Lamiroy, forthc.), the partitive (Carlier & Lamiroy forthc.), has furthermore shown that in most of these domains, Italian is ahead of Spanish, although the respective positions of Italian and Spanish on the cline seem to allow for more variability than the position of French. These studies suggest that with respect of the pace of grammaticalization, the three Romance languages can be situated on a scale in the following way. The pace of grammaticalization

Beyond external possession: genitive and dative with locational nouns in Latvian

The present article deals with the dative external possessor construction in Latvian. Attention is drawn to the widespread occurrence of this construction, extending to constructions with relational nouns practically functioning as adpositions. The carrying-over of the external possessor construction to what would otherwise be described as adpositional phrases creates certain problems for syntactic description. Emphasis is, however, on the semantic aspects. The features commonly associated with the external possessor construction, such as animacy, sentiency and affectedness, play no role here. It is suggested that the differences between the constructions with genitive and dative in spatial expressions with relational nouns are connected with the figure-ground configuration, the constructions with the dative serving to mark the shift of saliency from the figure (located object) to the ground (reference object). This, it is argued, is not an accidental extension of the external possessor construction to a domain where is was not originally applicable, but reflects the general principles underlying the external possessor construction. This can be formulated as the shifting of cognitive or discourse saliency from the figure/possessum to the ground/possessor in a locative/possessive structure.

Verbal Idioms with Body Part Nouns: A Dictionary Perspective on Inalienable Possession in Italian

In a typological perspective, the Romance Languages – at least in their European forms – belong to a wider subset of languages that have the external possessor construction, most typically displaye...

English and Celtic in contact (review)

Reviewed by: English and Celtic in contact Richard Coates English and Celtic in contact. By Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Paulasto. New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. xix, 312. ISBN 97804155266024. $133 (Hb). This book offers a painstaking presentation and evaluation of the evidence that has been claimed as relevant to the question of how great the influence of Celtic (C) on English (E) has been over a period of some 1,500 years. After a brief introduction, the authors present two large balanced sections, one dealing with 'early' influences and the other with influences 'in the modern age'. The shorter 'epilogue' consists of a chapter on the history of scholarship in this area (which is in many ways a recap of major themes in the earlier sections), a chapter 'reassessing' the evidence for C influence on E from both demographic and theoretical (including typological and sociolinguistic) perspectives, and a short conclusion. The apparatus consists of a rather small set of footnotes, a bibliography, a cited-author index, and a subject index. The authors, already well known individually for their original work on C-influenced varieties of E (e.g. Filppula 1999, Klemola 2000, Filppula et al. 2002, Paulasto 2006), are well informed both theoretically and philologically. Scholars should turn to this book as a valuable, sophisticated, and comprehensive account of the strongest relevant evidence. At one level, saying that is a sufficient appraisal of the book. If it consisted only of Part 2 and the epilogue, it would be largely uncontroversial. There is overwhelming formal evidence for the impact of the C languages on regional Englishes at all linguistic levels, and this is supported by a range of well-known sociolinguistic considerations. But there is a monster in the room provided by Part 1, and I concentrate on the issues that are raised in that part. The book has a rhetorical structure through which the undoubted plausibility of the claims made in Part 2 may stiffen the reader's attitude in favor of the more controversial material in Part 1, especially when reinforced by the recap in the epilogue. Part 1 covers the period from the earliest known contacts (encompassing the end of the period of Roman rule in Britain, c. 350-450) to approximately the Tudor period (1485-1603), with some reflection on modern dialect features that have stayed outside of the developing standard language and are, or may be, presumed to be early, in some sense. The great unresolved issue of this period is whether any of the long-recorded formal characteristics of E, especially those of the standard dialect, can be ascribed to contact with C. The traditional view notes the extreme paucity of C lexical borrowings into E and, at its crudest, infers from it that meaningful contact was negligible, at least in the earlier part of this period before the rate of the Anglo-Saxon westward advance [End Page 441] slowed down. During the twentieth century, some voices were raised proposing that some syntactic features of E invited comparison with C languages individually or collectively (e.g. the cleft construction, do-periphrasis, and the decline of the external possessor construction) and suggested a historical connection irrespective of the lexical evidence. More recently some evidence has been adduced from morphosyntax (e.g. the so-called Northern Subject Rule). The authors rehearse this intellectual history meticulously. The importance of the book is due to the position that it occupies in the growing wave of interest, since Poussa's work of 1990 onward, in the prehistory of E in its C context, which has generated a wealth of new data claimed to speak in favor of important effects of early contact. A state-of-the-art report right now is timely. The general problem with Part 1 can be summed up in a kind of syllogistic schema. There are a number of propositions, each of which is illustrated by a range of data. First, there are those that suggest there is something to explain: E is in many respects a structurally atypical (West) Germanic language. Second, there are those that suggest that the reasons may lie in C: C languages display many of the divergent features that...

Dative External Possessor Constructions in Sidaama

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Essays on Language Function and Language Type Dedicated to T. Givon

1. Instead of an Introduction 2. From His Colleagues 3. His Publications 4. The Essays 5. Semantic Aspects of Morphological Typology (by Bybee, Joan L.) 6. The Typology of Predicate Case Marking (by Comrie, Bernard) 7. Grammaticalization and the Gradience of Categories: Relator Nouns and Postpositions in Tibetan and Burmese (by DeLancey, Scott) 8. A Typology of Argument-Determined Constructions (by Dixon, R.M.W.) 9. Are Grammatical Relations Universal? (by Dryer, Matthew S.) 10. Introducing Ergative Word Order via Reanalysis: Word Order Change in the Cariban Family (by Gildea, Spike) 11. Living in Three Languages (by Grinevald, Colette) 12. Self-Abasement in Language: A Case Study on the Viability of a Metaphor (by Haiman, John) 13. The Misumalpan Causative Construction (by Hale, Kenneth L.) 14. On Attributive Possession in Kabiye (by Heine, Bernd) 15. When 'Grammar' and Discourse Clash: The Problem of Source Conflicts (by Hopper, Paul J.) 16. A Dynamic Account of Grammatical Function (by Langacker, Ronald W.) 17. On Zero Anaphora (by Li, Charles N.) 18. Head-Marking and Objecthood (by Lichtenberk, Frantisek) 19. Participant and Event Anaphora in Newspaper Articles (by Lord, Carol) 20. Lexical Affixes and Morphological Typology (by Mithun, Marianne) 21. Versatile Nominalizations (by Noonan, Michael) 22. The Maasai External Possessor Construction (by Payne, Doris L.) 23. Voice in Seko Padang (by Payne, Thomas E.) 24. Mind, Code and Text (by Slobin, Dan I.) 25. Index