The ways of speaking and the means of knowing

Tariana is an Arawak language spoken by about a hundred people in the Vaupés River Basin linguistic area in Brazil. A number of grammatical features reflect specific traits of the ways the people live. Manipulating genders correlates with the status of women: a respected and knowledgeable woman can be referred to with nonfeminine gender, as if 'promoted' to manhood. Classifiers occur in multiple environments, including number words, demonstratives, adjectives, and possessive constructions. Classifiers with specific semantics reflect riverine environment, taxonomic categorization of plants, and means of subsistence. Five evidentials obligatorily mark information source. Their use correlates with the requirement to be precise in stating how one knows things, and in the types of access to information. Nonvisual evidentials are used in talking about the feelings, physical states and uncontrolled actions of oneself and one’s core family members. Speakers are aware of the meanings and the uses of evidential, and are prepared to discuss and explain them. Evidentials are sensitive to technological changes, as they adjust to new ways of acquiring information. Evidentials and classifiers are shared across the multilingual area of the Vaupés River Basin. Contact between speakers of adjacent languages appear to have shaped the speakers’ interaction patterns and the associated language features. In contrast, gender manipulation is being lost by younger speakers, as the status of women undergoes transformations.

Deverbal and deadjectival nominalization in Dan: Not as different as one might think. A reply to Baker & Gondo (2020)

The paper (Baker & Gondo 2020) studies several issues in Dan morphosyntax: the formal differences between verbs, nouns and adjectives; two types of possessive constructions (with alienable and inalienable head nouns) and their syntactic structures; the derivation of nouns from verbs and adjectives; low and high nominalization; and possessive constructions with deverbal and deadjectival nouns. As it turns out, Baker & Gondo’s analyses are incorrect in some major points: the key formal differences between verbs, adjectives and nouns have been left unnoticed due to disregard for Dan tonal morphology, and for the same reason, the tonal marking of the high nominalization has also been ignored. Baker & Gondo’s syntactic analysis of the possessive construction with alienable nouns as analogous to the Saxon genitive (king’s house) cannot be accepted; in fact, it can be compared with the genitive construction seen in English the house of the king. Possessive constructions with deverbal and deadjectival nouns are not as radically opposed as one may think after reading Baker & Gondo’s paper; in fact, a noun derived from an intransitive verb can sometimes appear as an alienable noun with respect to its theme, and, conversely, a deadjectival noun can appear as a relational noun with respect to the modified noun.

The Kid’s Kid(’s) Bed: Generic or Possessive? A Mandarin Insight

The recursive computational mechanism generates an infinite range of expressions. However, little is known about how different concepts interact with each other within recursive structures. The current study investigated how Mandarin-speaking children dealt with possessives and generics in recursive structures. The picture-matching task showed that Mandarin-speaking children 4 to 6 had a bias for generics in ambiguous possessive constructions in Mandarin, where the genitive maker was covert (e.g., Yuehan de baobao chuang John’s kid bed, where baobao chuang kid bed has both a generic interpretation and a referential interpretation). It was found that that Mandarin-speaking children below 6 had a non-recursive interpretation of the possessive John’s kid(’s) bed, and instead understand kid’s bed to refer generically to a type of bed. This finding suggests that semantics does not parallel syntax in the acquisition of indirect recursion, in line with the prediction of the generic-as-default hypothesis which claims that generics are the default mode of representation of ambiguous statements when the statement can be either generic or non-generic. The delayed recursive possessive interpretation suggests that the full determiner phrase is acquired later than a noun phrase modification, which is universal in all languages. We also discuss the role of the overt functional category in the acquisition of indirect recursion.

Split possession and definiteness marking in American Norwegian

This article discusses definiteness marking in two possessive constructions that exhibit special patterns (split possession) for certain kinship nouns in Norwegian. It is shown that the special patterns, whereby the relevant nouns appear without a definite suffix, are retained by the majority speakers of American Norwegian (AmNo); some AmNo speakers use them even more extensively than homeland speakers, and only a minority do not use them. The forms without the suffix are analysed as a reflex of a poss feature that is a part of the featural make-up of certain kinship nouns (Julien 2005). I argue that the most conspicuous differences in distribution of this feature in the homeland vs. the heritage variety have emerged through a combination of decline in homeland Norwegian and retention and even extension in AmNo. The development in AmNo seems to be systematic and principled; it does not involve “loss” or incompleteness (e.g., Yager et al. 2015; Kupisch & Rothman 2016; Bayram et al. 2019).

Discourse behavior of possessives reflects the importance of interpersonal relationships

Nominal possessive constructions (e.g. Sam's car) present a challenge for theories of discourse since, unlike simpler nominal phrases (e.g. a car), they explicitly refer to two entities, not just one. Research on the discourse prominence of these two referents has been limited in scope and produced contradictory findings. We use a sentence continuation experiment to investigate the prominence of possessions as a function of their animacy. We find that possessed animates (e.g. her butler) are especially prominent. Their privileged status in discourse may relate to non-linguistic theories on the importance of interpersonal relationships.

A comparative study of possessive construction in Kurdish and Hungarian from a cognitive perspective

The present paper seeks to investigate the characteristics of possessive constructions in Kurdish (the Central variety also known as Sorani) and Hungarian from a cognitive viewpoint. Starting with nominal possessive constructions, which include attenuated possessors and nominal possessees, we will argue that both Kurdish and Hungarian make use of essentially similar typological strategies to encode the possessive relationship. Moreover, the defining characteristics of nominal possessive constructions in both languages will be justifiably accounted for through the same lines of cognitive argumentation in terms of Langacker's reference-point model (2008, 2009). However, a different cognitive treatment is proposed for cases in which the possessor and the possessee are nominal and linked to each other via an Ezafe. We will argue that Ezafe, which links the nominal head to its dependents in a Noun Phrase (Qharib et al. 1971; Moiin 1984; Ghomeshi 1997; Lotfi 2014), evokes an intrinsic asymmetric relationship between the possessor as the landmark and the possessee as the trajector. As the second major type of possessive constructions elaborated on in this paper, the predicative possessive is first classified into topic-possessive and be-possessive categories. Despite their subtle structural differences, it is again shown that both Kurdish and Hungarian employ almost similar clausal patterns to form both categories of predicative possessives, and the same cognitive models can be brought into play to account for their underlying characteristics. The final section of the present paper is devoted to the so-called ergative constructions in Kurdish. Seeking to propose a new cognitive approach to account for the peculiarities of the non-accusative alignment, we will argue that the so-called ergative constructions in Kurdish are conceptually linked to predicative possessive constructions.

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

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 ways of expressing attributive possession in Ket: possessive syntactic constructions

The paper analyzes the structural models of Ket possessive constructions. The means of ex-pressing possessive construction components and the ways of marking possessive relations between the first possessive construction component denoting the subject of possession (a possessor) and the second component indicating the object of possession (a possessum) are considered. The study is based on the conception proposed by E. Vajda, according to which the possessive markers are possessive pronominal clitics, used as either clitics or proclitics, depending on the context. Two-component and multiple-component constructions are identi-fied. The two-component constructions contain a possessor, a possessum, and a linking mark-er, the semantic scope of which is a possessum. The non-expanded and expanded possessive constructions are analyzed. Both the first and the second substantive component of the two-component construction may be expanded by an attribute. The two-component constructions having a possessor expanded by an attribute are characterized by a distant ordering of a pos-sessor noun and a possessum noun, including distant positions of a possessive proclitic and a possessum noun. The derivative processes of transforming possessive constructions are con-sidered. The rising derivation process consists of embedding one more possessor into the con-struction with an original possessor. Both possessors are marked by appropriate possessive pronominal clitics. It is found that in Ket, the recessive derivation of omitting a possessor noun expressed by a personal pronoun stem is available as well, resulting in a construction with a non-expressed (omitted) possessor. The corresponding possessive pronominal clitic attaching proclitically to possessum noun is overtly retained at the surface morphosyntactic level.