Approaches to Predicative Possession: The view from Slavic and Finno-Ugric (Bloomsbury Studies in Theoretical Linguistics)

"This book discusses existential and possessive constructions in two important, yet under-studied, language families, Slavic and Finno-Ugric. Using data from the Slavic languages of Polish, Belarusian and Russian, and the Finno-Ugric languages of Finnish, Hungarian, Meadow Mari, Komi-Permiyak and Udmurt, as well as the closely related Selkup of the Samoyedic family, the chapters in this volume analyse predicative possession in current syntactic terms. Seeking an answer to the theoretical question of whether BE-possessives and HAVE-possessives are just accidental values of the 'Possessive Parameter' or are intrinsically related, this book takes a comparative approach to a whole range of syntactic and semantic phenomena that appear in these constructions, including the definiteness restriction, genitive of negation, person/number agreement, argument structure and extractability. The individual case studies can be easily integrated into the Principles & Parameters framework in terms of parametric variation. Approaches to Predicative Possession is an important contribution to our understanding of predicative possession across languages, with findings that can be fruitfully extended to other language families. It is an equally useful source of information for theoretical linguists, typologists, and graduate students of linguistics."-- Provided by publisher "This book discusses existential and possessive constructions in two important, yet under-studied, language families, Slavic and Finno-Ugric. Using data from the Slavic languages of Polish, Belarusian and Russian, and the Finno-Ugric languages of Finnish, Hungarian, Meadow Mari, Komi-Permiyak and Udmurt, as well as the closely related Selkup of the Samoyedic family, the chapters in this volume analyse predicative possession in current syntactic terms. Seeking an answer to the theoretical question of whether BE-possessives and HAVE-possessives are just accidental values of the 'Possessive Parameter' or are intrinsically related, this book takes a comparative approach to a whole range of syntactic and semantic phenomena that appear in these constructions, including the definiteness restriction, genitive of negation, person/number agreement, argument structure and extractability. The individual case studies can be easily integrated into the Principles et Parameters framework in terms of parametric variation. Approaches to Predicative Possession is an important contribution to our understanding of predicative possession across languages, with findings that can be fruitfully extended to other language families. It is an equally useful source of information for theoretical linguists, typologists, and graduate students of linguistics."-- Cover Contents List of Contributors Editors’ Note 1 Introduction Gréte Dalmi 2 Genitive of Negation (GoN) in Polish possessive and locative existential sentences: A testing tool for case overwriting, case projections and derivational phases Jacek Witkoś 3 Extraction of possessive NP-complements and the structure of the nominal domain in Polish Piotr Cegłowski 4 The Definiteness Effect in Russian existential and possessive sentences Olga Kagan 5 Predicative possession in Belarusian, a mixed BE/HAVE language Egor Tsedryk 6 Predicative possession as a clause type in Finnish Maria Vilkuna 7 The argument structure of BE-possessives in Hungarian Gréte Dalmi 8 Existential possession in Meadow Mari Alexandra Simonenko 9 Predicative possession in Permic Nikolett F. Gulyás 10 Predicative possessive constructions in Selkup dialects Beáta Wagner-Nagy 11 Conclusion Gréte Dalmi, Jacek Witkoś and Piotr Cegłowski Index