29.4524, Confs: Historical Linguistics/Germany

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4524. Wed Nov 14 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4524, Confs: Historical Linguistics/Germany

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Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2018 23:39:22
From: Grete Dalmi [grete at t-online.hu]
Subject: Predicative Possession in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

 
Predicative Possession in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective 

Date: 21-Aug-2019 - 22-Aug-2019 
Location: Leipzig, Germany 
Contact: Iliyana Krapova 
Contact Email: krapova at unive.it 

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics 

Meeting Description: 

(Session of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea)

We hereby announce the following workshop call on Predicative Possession on
Slavic and Finno-Ugric for SLE 2019 to be held at the University of Leipzig on
21st-24th August 2019. Originally planned as a one day workshop, the convenors
will be happy to turn it into a two-day workshop if proper interest is shown.

Predicative possession is realized in various ways cross-linguistically.
Stassen (2009) establishes four major types of predicative possession:
locational BE-possessives, BE WITH-possessives, topic possessives and
HAVE-possessives. While in Germanic and Romance languages HAVE-possessives are
predominantly used, Uralic languages employ locational BE-possessives with the
possessor taking a more prominent VP-internal position and bearing oblique
case. In the Slavic language family, West Slavic uses HAVE-possessives while
East Slavic has locational BE-possessives. Old Church Slavic displays
locational BE-possessives, which is replaced by HAVE-possessives in
present-day Bulgarian. In Baltic Slavic the two types co-occur with some
semantic restrictions on the possessee. These areal and lexical distributions
raise the question whether the choice between HAVE-possessives and locational
BE-possessives is the syntactic reflex of parametric variation or whether the
two forms are more intrinsically related.

The derivationist approach relates BE-possessives and HAVE-possessive to
copular sentences. This view goes back to Benveniste’s (1966) claim that
possessive sentences are nothing but inverted copular sentences. which is also
reflected in Kayne (1993), Den Dikken (1997), Jung (2011) and Myler (2016).
Under the lexicalist approach, BE-possessives and HAVE-possessives are
structurally distinct constructions. Both sentence types have two
participants, the possessor and the possessee (see Paducheva 2000, Partee &
Borschev 2008, Blaszczak 2007, 2010). BE-possessives share a whole range of
syntactic and semantic properties with BE-existentials, The Definiteness
Restriction in affirmative sentences, GEN NEG in Slavic negated possessive and
existential sentences, binding relations, verb agreement and case marking on
the possessor and the possessee are important issues that cannot be ignored in
connection with predicative possession.
 

Program:

Potential participants and titles

1. Genitive of Negation in Polish possessive and locative existential
sentences: A testing  tool for Case Overwriting, Case Projection and the PIC
(Jacek Witkoś, AMU Poznan)
Polish Genitive of Negation (GoN, cf. inter alia Przepiórkowski 1999,
Błaszczak 2001, Witkoś 2003), applies to all Accusative-taking transitive
verbs, including both the possessive construction and the locative
construction. The chapter examines properties of GoN from the perspective of
current approaches to case theory, mainly case overwriting (Pesetsky 2013,
Bailyn 2014) and nano-syntax (Starke 2001, Caha 2009). Both theories
successfully deal with the manifestation of the superior case with respect to
case hierarchy (Blake 2004), where {…Gen > Acc > Nom}) but they provide very
different answers as to why Gen cannot supersede other cases, such as Dat or
Inst. Both also need to face the challenge of Long Distance GoN, where main
clause negation forces Genitive on the object of the infinitive. 

2. The historical development of predicative possession in Bulgarian  (Iliyana
Krapova, Ca’ Foscari, Venice)
Bulgarian is a language with have-possessives only, while Old Bulgarian/Old
Church Slavonic had be-possessives: a) be+P +genitive, b) be+dative (Latin
mihi est), also used in existential sentences. In this talk, I will draw a
crucial distinction between these two structures, which has to do with their
semantics: the prepositional genitive was used to encode temporary possession
of concrete, countable possessa, while the possessive dative had part-whole
semantics and could only be used with inalienable possessa, kinship relations
and abstract states and concepts (McAnallen 2011). This combination of
properties played a crucial role in reanalyzing be-possessives as locations in
the history of Bulgarian, while have-possessives emerged from a reanalysis of
the possessive dative into a have-possessive/existential along the lines of
Kayne’s (1993) approach to the underlying structure of have as BE+P.  
The idea that clausal possession has a DP-source has been exploited in
numerous studies starting from Szabolcsi (1983, 1994). However, as rightly
pointed out by Boneh&Sichel (2010), no distinction is usually made between
Part-Whole and Temporary Location.

3. Predicative possession in Belarusian, a mixed BE/HAVE language (Egor
Tsedryk,  Saint Mary’s Halifax, CA)
This paper offers a morpho-syntactic analysis of possessors used with the
existential BE and possessive HAVE predicates, comparing a predominantly
BE-system language (Russian) with a mixed BE/HAVE system language
(Belarusian). According to Bjorkman & Cowper (2016), the core semantic feature
of predicative possession is [INCL]: it encodes a relation of
inclusion/containment (understood broadly). In East Slavic, this feature is
realized as a locative u ‘at’ + GEN (genitive) in the specifier of an
applicative head (Appl) bearing [INCL]. Assuming a realizational view of
morphology (post-syntactic insertion), I hypothesize that mac’ and byc’ in
Belarusian are both instances of vƎ that may or may not bear an accusative
case feature. That is, availability of ACC on vƎ is the hallmark of a mixed
BE/HAVE system found in Belarusian. A case feature on vƎ purportedly blocks
the locative realization of [INCL] in the specifier of Appl and forces the
spell out of the head itself, assuming that vƎ is incorporated into Appl.

4. Predicative possession as a clause type in Finnish (Maria Vilkuna,
Helsinki)
In this paper Finnish possessive sentences are discussed in the framework of
Construction Grammar. As in Finnic and Saamic languages in general, Finnish
canonical predicative possession represents the BE-possessive, more
specifically the Locational type as defined by Heine (1997) and Stassen
(2009), given a broad definition of location. The Finnish pattern is generally
seen as a crystallized subtype of so-called existential sentences, which
display an “inverse” encoding of figure-ground relations (Creissels 2014).
Both types challenge most notions of subjecthood, but this is even clearer in
the possessive pattern. Although canonical instances of the possessive and
existential patterns are distinctive enough, their exact borders are hard to
draw, and on the other hand, the possessive sentence has subtypes that can,
themselves, be seen as separate constructions. This paper attempts to clarify
the criteria for drawing these lines.

5. The argument structure of BE-possessives in Hungarian (Gréte Dalmi, BME,
Budapest)
This paper discusses the argument structure of BE-existentials and
BE-possessives in Hungarian. In contrast to the traditional view (see Kayne
1993, Szabolcsi 1992, 1994, Den Dikken 1997), according to which
BE-possessives and HAVE-possessives resemble copular BE-sentences in that the
verb takes one single argument (i.e. the small clause) in them, the paper
argues that existential/possessive BE, just like possessive HAVE, selects two
arguments. While existential and possessive sentences show the Definiteness
Restriction in several languages, copular sentences never do. This and a whole
range of syntactic and semantic properties justify the segregation of
existential and possessive BE-sentences from copular BE-sentences. The paper
relates existential and possessive BE in Hungarian to psych-predicates of the
piacere-type (Belletti & Rizzi 1988, Grimshaw 1990, Harley 2002). 

6. Types of predicative possession and possessors in Meadow Mari (Alexandra
Simonenko, University of Ghent) 
This paper is concerned with BE-existentials and BE-possessives in Meadow Mari
based on original fieldwork data and a tree-bank of Meadow Mari. The
theoretical focus of the chapter is two-fold. First, it discusses the
syntactic status of the possessor DP in predicative possessive constructions
viz. the possibility of analysing it as an external possessor which has raised
out of the possessee's DP. It has been established for these languages that
genitive possessors have a greater syntactic freedom compared to other nominal
dependents, in particular, they can be separated from the possessee by any
other constituent. At the same time, they trigger the appearance of the so
called possessive suffix on the possessee. The second locus of interest lies
in the semantics of BE-existentials and BE-possessives with regard to the
so-called Definiteness Effect. If possessors are analysed as base-generated
inside the DP, as discussed in the first part of the chapter, this opens up a
series of interesting questions concerning the effects of raising on
presupposionality, since (at least some) DP-internal possessors seem to
trigger an existential presupposition, which has been proposed to lie at the
root of the Definiteness Effect. 

7. BE-possessives in two Permic languages (Nikolett F. Gulyás, ELTE, Budapest)
This paper discusses BE-possessives in two Permic languages (Finno-Ugric,
Uralic), Komi-Permyak and Udmurt. Both BE-possessives and BE-existentials will
be introduced from a typological point of view (Stassen 2009). With respect to
attributive possession, a distinction is made between alienable and
inalienable possessees and also to some extent between animate and inanimate
possessors (Bartens 2000, Edygarova 2010, Ponomarova 2010). These differences
will be examined in predicative possession, using elicited data from native
consultants.

8. Predicative possession in Selkup (Beáta Wagner-Nagy, Hamburg University) 
In this paper predicative possessive constructions in Selkup (Samoyedic,
Uralic) will be surveyed. 
Selkup knows only one verb which can be used in locational and existential
sentences: the BE-verb ɛɛqo. Thus, in both sentence types this verb is the
connecting element between the locational part and the theme. Existential
verbs of the type present in Northern Samoyedic are unknown in Selkup.
Locational and existential sentences only differ from each other in word order
(see Wagner-Nagy 2015) as there is no explicit morphological marking for the
definiteness of the theme. This topic will be examined using corpus data as
well as elicited materials.





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