Prenominal Possessives Research Articles

What Can Be Changed Through Contact? Possessive Syntax in Megleno-Romanian and Eolian Compared

This article explores the order of possessives with respect to nouns in Megleno-Romanian, a branch of Daco-Romance, and Eolian, a variety of southern Italo-Romance. Both are in intense language contact situations, the former with the south Slavonic varieties of Bulgarian and Macedonian, the latter with the southern Italo-Romance variety of Sicilian along with southern regional Italian. In particular, we show that while superficially, both Megleno-Romanian and Eolian copied the patterns found in their respective contact languages, the situation is much more complex. Megleno-Romanian shows high noun movement with kinship terms and low noun movement with common nouns, a situation also found in south Slavonic. In the case of Eolian, younger speakers categorically lack N-to-D movement with kinship terms, reflecting the typical Sicilian pattern. In both cases, this gives rise to prenominal possessives, thus diverging from the most common position of possessives in Eastern Romance, which are generally postnominal in unmarked contexts. Ultimately, these case studies show that the position of possessives is epiphenomenal to the level of noun movement in the varieties under investigation. On this note, deeper structural borrowing concerning the nature of possessives (i.e., whether they have an adjectival or determiner value) did not emerge in our findings and is worthy of further investigation.

Spanish Emphatic Possessives and Reflexivity

AbstractThis paper studies the interpretive properties of emphatic possessives in Spanish (e.g.,El apartamento tiene su cocina y todo‘The flat has its own kitchen and all’), focusing on a feature that distinguishes this type of possessives from canonical prenominal possessives: their reflexive status. It is first claimed that emphatic possessives are consistently used in order to confirm and reinforce a pre-existent possession relation. Certain cases that prima facie might cast doubts on the characterization of emphatic possessives as reflexives are further addressed, showing that possessives with an emphatic meaning always behave like anaphors. The role reflexivity plays in the expression of emphasis is finally discussed, arguing that emphatic possessives belong to a group of optional non-core reflexive pronouns with an emphatic import, which also includes emphatic pronouns and the aspectual dative.

Binding in South Slavic and DP: A Data-Driven Approach

Abstract: This paper reports on a set of experiments designed to test the binding potential of prenominal possessives in Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian. Despić (2013) argues that the differences in binding possibilities observed between English and Serbian provide support for the Parameterized DP Hypothesis (e.g., Fukui 1988; Zlatić 1997; Bošković 2003, 2005, 2008). LaTerza (2016) tests whether the claim holds true for two South Slavic DP-languages, Bulgarian and Macedonian, and concludes that it does not. Data provided in LaTerza 2016 is further discussed in Franks 2019. Based on three interesting observations—the use of a clitic vs. full pronoun, different binding behavior of pronominal and nominal possessives in Bulgarian, and acceptability judgments reported for Macedonian and Serbian—Franks (2019) concludes that Bulgarian and Macedonian have the same binding potentials as English, confirming Despić's original hypothesis. Srdanović and Rinke (2020) provide Serbian experimental data focusing on possessives in subject position and coreferential readings of pronouns in object positions. The authors show that Serbian allows coreferential readings just like English, especially when clitics are used. Our paper provides experimental data for Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian. Our conclusions are that the three languages exhibit almost identical binding potentials. This finding is in line with the ones in Srdanović and Rinke 2020 since it also disproves the claim that the differences in binding result from the nominal structure present in a language: DP or NP.

Притяжательные детерминативы и эффект определённости в английских экзистенциальных предложениях: корпусное исследование

This paper investigates one of the instances of the definiteness effect: the access of the prenominal possessives “my/your/its/her/his/their/our” to the postverbal noun phrases in existential there-sentences. The definiteness effect is still one of the most topical and controversial problems to discuss. The existing studies of the definiteness effect are centred on the definite article and skip the prenominal possessives. Considered as strong determiners the prenominal possessives can occur in existential contexts under certain conditions. The corpus-based analysis results in fixing these licensing conditions. We suggest that it is the enumeration and not the definiteness/indefiniteness distinction that sets the constraints for this licensing. We assume that being scalar-neutral elements the possessives support the listing contexts at any stage of the enumeration process: at the beginning, in midstream or at the final point summing up the previous ideas. The enumeration process is associated with pointing the location of the mentioned objects, which in turn supports the deictic meaning inherent in existential sentences with possessive postverbal noun phrases. The scheme constructing the unified meaning of there-sentences with possessive pivots covers four features: existence, enumeration, location and deixis. It is enumeration that ultimately turns out to be the necessary licensing condition.

The evolution of possessive phrases and the rise of DP in French, Spanish, and Portuguese

This paper deals with the evolution of nominal expressions with prenominal possessives in Romance languages. Until now, the prevalent view has been that their historical development follows one of the two diachronic paths: either they stop co-occurring with determiners (French, Spanish) or they start requiring their presence (European Portuguese). One common analysis associates the first case with a transition from a modifier to a determiner semantics of possessives and the second with a retention of a modifier semantics (e.g. Alexiadou 2004). It has also been observed, however, that documented Romance languages each make use of two morphologically distinct possessive paradigms, the so-called short and long forms, and, at least for French, that the short forms co-occur with determiners in historical documents less frequently than the long ones (Butet 2018). We adduce novel quantitative evidence from treebanks of French, Spanish, and Portuguese to the latter observation and show for the first time that the two paradigms followed very different evolutionary trajectories: frequency of determiners goes monotonically up with long possessives and goes up and then down with the short possessives across the three languages. Given these new data, we argue that the only point of evolutionary divergence in Romance possessive DPs is the choice of either the long or the short prenominal possessive in each of the languages, while the semantics of long and short possessives is stable both diachronically and across the three languages we examine. We also argue that the observed diachronic developments are consequences of a pan-Romance rise of a DP grammar. The paper thus contributes to our understanding of the emergence of DP in general and definiteness marking in particular, of the semantico-syntactic architecture of possessive DPs, as well as of the evolutionary divergence and convergence within a language family.

Grammatical Gender and Declension Class in Language Change: A Study of the Loss of Feminine Gender in Norwegian

In this paper, we investigate an ongoing change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that the feminine form of the indefinite article is quickly disappearing from several dialects, which has led to claims that the feminine gender is being lost from the language. We have carried out a study of the status of the feminine in possessives across five age groups of speakers of the Tromsø dialect. Our findings show that the prenominal possessives are affected by the change to the same extent as the indefinite article, while forms that have been argued not to be exponents of gender (the definite suffix and the postnominal possessive) are generally unaffected.

Possessives, from Franco-Provençal and Occitan Systems to Contact Dialects in Apulia and Calabria

This article investigates the contact-induced reorganization of the possessive system in the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken from around the 12th century in the villages of Celle and Faeto in North Apulia and Guardia Piemontese in North-West Calabria. Gallo-Romance possessives exclude the article in the prenominal position, whereas in the Southern Italian dialects, possessives follow the noun preceded by the definite article. This original contrast is no longer visible in the varieties of Celle, Faeto and Guardia which changed the original prenominal position to the postnominal position combining with the article, except with kinship terms, preserving the original prenominal position. At the heart of contact phenomena, there are bilingualism and transfer mechanisms between the languages included in the complex knowledge of the speaker, suggesting a test bed for the treatment of language variation and parameterization. We propose an account of morpho-syntactic and interpretive properties of possessives, making use of the insights from the comparison of contact systems with prenominal (Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties) and postnominal (Southern Italian dialects) possessives. The final part examines the distribution of possessives, tracing it back to the definiteness properties of DP and proposes a phasal treatment based on syntactic and interpretive constraints.

The possessive enclitics with kinship nouns in Italo-Romance and the possessive determiners in the Francoprovençal of Faeto

Abstract This paper deals with the possessive constructions in Italo-Romance dialects compared with the possessive constructions of one Francoprovençal (Gallo-Romance) variety spoken in Faeto (Foggia, Apulia). Francoprovençal possessive constructions are at a first glance distinct from Central and Southern Italian possessive constructions, mainly since in Francoprovençal (as in French) possessive forms (clitics) are prenominal. In Central and Southern Italian dialects, we find instead a split possession: 1) postnominal enclitic possessives (weak possessive markers) associated with parental kinship nouns distinct from 2) prenominal possessives associated with common nouns and postnominal strong possessive forms. Crucially, I claim that enclitic possessives are inflexional affixes, that receive a structural word-internal linearization from the same external (syntactical) linearization identified for proclitic possessive markers (in Faeto). I retain that the distinction between postnominal weak enclitics in Italian dialects and Francoprovençal weak prenominal possessive constructions is based on the inalienability (parental kin nouns + enclitics in DP). All possessive clitics (proclitics and enclitics) show a common syntactic configuration and differ only in Distributed Morphology, according to a “late” feature insertion and operations after syntax. Indeed, the possessive determiners represent three different morphological spells out of the same syntactic object: the bundle of features [Person], [(Gender) Number], [Definite], generated in functional heads.

The role of crosslinguistic differences in second language anticipatory processing: An event-related potentials study

The present study uses event-related potentials to investigate how crosslinguistic (dis)similarities modulate anticipatory processing in the second language (L2). Participants read predictive stories in English that made a genitive construction consisting of a third-person singular possessive pronoun and a kinship noun (e.g., his mother) likely in an upcoming continuation. The possessive pronoun's form depended on the antecedent's natural gender, which had been previously established in the stories. The continuation included either the expected genitive construction or an unexpected one with a possessive pronoun of the opposite gender. We manipulated crosslinguistic (dis)similarity by comparing advanced English learners with either Swedish or Spanish as their L1. While Swedish has equivalent possessive pronouns that mark the antecedent's natural gender (i.e., hans/hennes “his/her”), Spanish does not. In fact, Spanish possessive pronouns mark the syntactic features (number, gender) of the possessed noun (e.g., nosotros queremos a nuestra madre “we-MASC love our-FEM mother-FEM). Twenty-four native speakers of English elicited an N400 effect for prenominal possessives that were unexpected based on the possessor noun's natural gender, consistent with the possibility that they activated the pronoun's form or its semantic features (natural gender). Thirty-two Swedish-speaking learners yielded a qualitatively and quantitatively native-like N400 for unexpected prenominal possessives. In contrast, twenty-five Spanish-speaking learners showed a P600 effect for unexpected possessives, consistent with the possibility that they experienced difficulty integrating a pronoun that mismatched the expected gender. Results suggest that differences with respect to the features encoded in the activated representation result in different predictive mechanisms among adult L2 learners.

The semantics of prenominal possessives in Russian

Traditionally Russian prenominal possessives are classified as possessive adjectives (Isačenko 1960; Townsend 1980). In more recent work by Babyonyshev (1997) it is claimed that prenominal possessives are functional elements that are hosted outside nominal phrase, which means that they cannot be adjectives. This claim is based on the ability of possessives to fill an agent argument of event nominals. In this paper I will provide evidence that syntactically prenominal possessives do behave like adjectives. I will propose a semantic analysis that will account for the peculiar properties that prenominal possessives have.

Struktur Makna Ambiguitas Partikel ‘No’ dalam Percakapan Bahasa Jepang pada Siswa Level 1C di Pandan College

This research aims to describe the ambiguity meaning structure of ‘no’ particle in Japanese conversation of level 1C students at Pandan College. This research belongs to qualitative descriptive. The subject of this research is 1C Level students of Pandan College year 2019, while the object of this research is ‘no’ particle used in student’s Japanese conversation. The data collection method used is the attentive observation method with data recording and transcription techniques. The data analysis method used is the interlingual identity method. The results of this research are : (1) the ‘no’ particle used in the Japanese conversation of level 1C students is divided into two structural patterns meaning ambiguity, there are prenominal double possessives and prenominal adjective-possessives; and (2) the possessive relations of the 'no' particle can be expressed as possession, part-whole, location, and quantity.

The pragmatics of possession: A corpus study of English prenominal possessives

We present a large-scale corpus study of English prenominal possessives (e.g., Mary's house) which investigates how their referential interpretations (e.g., ‘the house Mary owns’) are linguistically supported in natural language contexts. The study is set against a long tradition of formal semantic accounts which take possessive interpretations to arise primarily from the lexical semantics of the possessive noun phrase, thereby suggesting that pragmatic reasoning plays a lesser role (Partee, 1983/1997; Barker, 1995, 2000; Vikner & Jensen, 2002, 2003, 2004). One claim of these accounts is that non-lexically derived or ‘pragmatic’ interpretations (e.g., ‘the house Mary dreams of buying’) require explicit contextual support, while this is not needed for ‘lexical’ interpretations (e.g., ‘the house Mary owns’), which are considered default and available in the absence of contextual support. The empirical results from our study suggest a complex picture whereby interpretations of both purported types receive various kinds and degrees of contextual support. We argue that this, coupled with independent evidence that the linguistic co-text usually explicates the relationships between discourse referents and that context-free interpretations are a myth, jeopardizes the cognitive plausibility of interpretation taxonomies which distinguish ‘lexical’ from ‘pragmatic’ interpretations. We sketch a more cognitively-oriented pragmatic approach to possessive interpretations that takes into consideration the multidimensionality of context while attributing an overall greater role to pragmatic reasoning.

On maximality in Mandarin possessives

Abstract The possessive construction in Mandarin is similar to English prenominal possessives except that maximality is presupposed only for cases involving inherently relational nouns. In this paper, I adopt the hypothesized split of argument and modifier genitives proposed by Partee & Borschev (2001, 2003) and argue that modifier-genitives can occur NP-internally in Mandarin possessives, whose appearance is restricted to cases with non-relational nouns. The discrepancy of the maximality presupposition observed in Mandarin can thus be captured since non-relational nouns can have a split of interpretations between argument and modifier genitives, resulting in a non-maximality reading.

Duplicity in possessive merger: evidence from Spanish alienable possessive constructions

AbstractIn this paper, I argue that Spanish prenominal and postnominal possessives target different external merge positions focusing on alienable possessive constructions. The analysis is developed alongside a proposal on the organization of DPs, according to which articles are merged as a DP-internal category between the domains assigned to direct and indirect modifiers. Prenominal possessives are determiners reanalyzed from direct modification adjectives whereas postnominal possessives are indirect modification adjectives that arise as predicates of reduced relative clauses. This analysis provides a principled explanation on the behavior of Spanish possessives that is lacking in the generalized idea that they are pronouns with a unique merge position. Arguments are also presented showing that syntax-driven phonological restrictions condition the derivation of DPs. The account successfully derives the core properties of word order variation and related issues within possessive constructions.

Evaluative prenominal possessives in Spanish

In this paper, the properties of Spanish evaluative prenominal possessives (i.e. the affective possessive preceding a proper name, the so-called “emphatic possessive”, and the possessive in the Old and American Spanish doubled possessive construction) are thoroughly described, and compared with those of canonical prenominal possessives. It is mainly proposed that evaluative possessives, in contrast to canonical prenominal possessives, are not base-generated as nominal modifiers and then raise to D0, but are directly merged (mostly) within the DP domain, thus capturing the fact that affective, emphatic and doubling possessives just evaluate the relation between the possessum and the possessor, and are not interpreted as complements of the noun. In order to account for their different distribution, it is further argued that the three types of Spanish evaluative prenominal possessives are inserted (basically) in different structural positions in an split-DP.

Nump and Possp in Dialectal Brazilian Portuguese

In standard Brazilian Portuguese (BP), as well as in other Romance languages, possessives have uninterpretable number features, which are valued via nominal agreement. However, dialects of BP, especially the one spoken in Minas Gerais, have shown that 2nd person possessives, in postnominal position, do not have number agreement with the noun. In order to account for these facts, I will argue that, in this grammar, number features on 2nd person possessives are reanalyzed as being: (i) associated with the person (rather than the noun) and (ii) valued. From the frst postulation, ‘seu' is expected to be the possessive for 2nd person singular, and ‘seus' for 2nd person plural. From the second postulation, no number concord is expected to be triggered on the possessive. In addition, based on Danon (2011) and Norris (2014), I will argue that cardinals divide BP DPs into two domains in that phrases located above NumP are marked with the plural morpheme, while phrases below it are unmarked. In this sense, because prenominal possessives precede cardinals (NumP), they must be marked with the plural morpheme for nominal agreement; whereas postnominal possessives, which follow NumP, must be unmarked. Free from the plural marking associated with nominal agreement, postnominal 2nd person possessives favor the reanalysis of the morpheme ‘-s' as indicating the number associated with person features.

New insights into an old form: A variationist analysis of the pleonastic possessive in Guatemalan Spanish

AbstractRomance languages differ as regards the adjectival or article-like status of prenominal possessives. While in Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Old Spanish, they pattern like adjectives and co-occur with articles, and in French and Modern Spanish, they compete with the latter for the same structural position. The different distribution of possessives is claimed to reflect distinct stages on a grammaticalization cline (Alexiadou, 2004). This paper focuses on a variety of Central American Spanish where the Old Spanish co-occurrence of an (indefinite) article and a possessive in the prenominal domain has been maintained (as inuna mi amiga‘a my friend’). Based on a variationist study of interview data extracted from the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish for Spain and America (PRESEEA) Guatemala corpus, I will argue that it is indeed the indefinite article that shows signs of retarded grammaticalization. Yet, rather than extending to the variety as a whole, this retardation is context-specific.

Feature interpretability and the positions of 2nd person possessives in Brazilian Portuguese

Conceitos como interpretabilidade e valoração de traços-φ (Chomsky, 2001; Pesetsky and Torrego, 2007) têm desempenhado um papel central no estudo dos universais linguísticos. Neste respeito, em português padrão, assim como em outras línguas românicas, os pronomes possessivos carregam traços não interpretáveis de número, que são valorados via concordância nominal. No entanto, certos dialetos do português do Brasil (PB) mostram que o possessivo de 2.a pessoa, principalmente em posição posposta, não concorda em número com o nome. Por exemplo, no dialeto mineiro, um N no singular pode coocorrer com possessivo no plural, que se refere à 2.a pessoa do plural (‘de vocês’). Do mesmo modo, um N no plural pode coocorrer com possessivo no singular, que se refere à 2.a pessoa do singular. Para explicar esses fatos, argumentarei que, nesta gramática, os traços de número no possessivo de 2.a pessoa são (i) traços da pessoa e não do nome e são (ii) interpretáveis. Com base na primeira formulação, prediz-se que ‘seu’ seja o possessivo de 2.a pessoa do singular, e ‘seus’ do plural. Com base na segunda formulação, não se desencadeia concordância em número no possessivo. Além disso, seguindo Danon (2011) e Norris (2014), argumentarei que os cardinais dividem DPs do PB em dois domínios, sendo que os sintagmas situados acima de NumP são marcados com o morfema de plural em concordância nominal, enquanto os situados abaixo de NumP são impedidos de terem esta marca. Assim, pelo fato de o possessivo pré-nominal estar antes do cardinal, ele é obrigatoriamente marcado com o morfema de plural, enquanto o possessivo pós-nominal não tem esta marca. Livre da marca morfológica de concordância nominal, o possessivo pós-nominal de 2.a pessoa favorece a reanálise do ‘-s’ como indicador do número da pessoa.

Possessives and relative clauses in Spanish

AbstractIn this paper, the properties of Spanish DPs including a possessive pronoun and a relative clause are thoroughly described and analyzed. Adopting a raising analysis for both prenominal possessives and restrictive relatives, it is claimed that the incompatibility of a determiner possessive and a restrictive relative in current standard Spanish is due to the violation of an interpretive constraint sanctioning subextraction from [Spec, CP]. It is further proposed that, in constructions in which a possessive pronoun does combine with a relative clause, the possessive is not subextracted from [Spec, CP]. It is finally shown that this proposal accounts for different well-formed dialectal and Old Spanish patterns with a prenominal possessive and a restrictive relative and also applies to data from other Romance languages.

COMBINING GEOLINGUISTIC SOURCES IN DIALECT SYNTAX: THREE CASE-STUDIES THROUGH ALPI AND CORDIAL-SIN

Although geolinguistic projects do not usually provide adequate (if any) coverage of syntactic variation, current studies of dialect syntax still may benefit from data that were made a vailable in traditional linguistic atlases. Concomitantly, dialect corpora , as a different kind of linguistic resource for the study of nonstandard syntax, often grant access to spontaneous oral data that allow the study of phenomena that are hard to eluci date through traditional questionnaires. In this paper we present and discuss three morphosyntactic phenomena in European Portuguese varieties, as they appear through both kinds of sources – more specifically, the Atlas Linguistico de la Peninsula Iberica (ALPI), a traditional linguistic atlas, and CORDIAL - SIN, a dialect corpus. Through both sources, we will investigate the geolinguistic syntactic variation concerning: (i) the distribution of gerund forms; (ii) the presence of articles before prenominal pos sessives; and (iii) the distribution of verbal forms ending in - ra . The contrast and complementarity of both kinds of sources, namely, their advantages and inconveniences, invite us to discuss new methods that integrate complementary methods in collecting data for dialect syntax.