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This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive cross-linguistic overview of an understudied typological phenomenon, the clause-level argument-like behaviour of internal possessors. In some languages, adnominal possessors - or a subset thereof - figure more prominently than expected in the phrase-external syntax, by controlling predicate agreement and/or acting as a switch-reference pivot in same-subject relations. There is no independent evidence that such possessors are external to the possessive phrase or that they assume head status within it. This creates a puzzle for virtually all syntactic theories, as it is generally believed that agreement and switch-reference target phrasal heads rather than dependents.
Following an introduction to the typology of the phenomenon and an overview of possible syntactic analyses, chapters in the volume offer more focussed case studies from a wide range of languages spoken in the Americas, Eurasia, South Asia, and Australia. The contributions are largely based on novel data collected by the authors and present thorough discussions of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of prominent internal possessors in the relevant languages.
The volume will be of interest to researchers and students from graduate level upwards in the fields of comparative linguistics, syntax, typology, and semantics.
List of contents
- 1: Irina Nikolaeva, András Bárány, and Oliver Bond: Introduction
- 2: Yogendra P. Yadava, Oliver Bond, Irina Nikolaeva, and Sandy Ritchie: The syntax of possessor prominence in Maithili
- 3: Oliver Bond, Felicity Meakins, and Rachel Nordlinger: Prominent possessor indexing in Gurindji
- 4: Sandy Ritchie: Disjoint and reflexive prominent internal possessor constructions in Chimane
- 5: Jean-Pierre Koenig and Karin Michelson: Extended agreement in Oneida (Iroquoian)
- 6: Asli Göksel and Balkiz Öztürk: Conditions on prominent internal possessors in Turkish
- 7: Sergey Say: Prominent internal possessors in Bashkir
- 8: Irina Nikolaeva and András Bárány: Proximate possessors
- References
- Index
About the author
András Bárány is a Post-doctoral Researcher at SOAS, University of London. His PhD from the University of Cambridge explored the relationship between case and agreement in Hungarian and from a comparative perspective. His research interests include morphosyntactic phenomena across languages, such as possession, switch-reference, and differential argument marking, as well as Uralic and Turkic languages. He is the author of the OUP volume
Person, Case, and Agreement: The Morphosyntax of Inverse Agreement and Global Case Splits (2017).
Oliver Bond is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey. His research interests include theoretical morphosyntax, typology, and language documentation and description. His work has appeared in journals such as
Journal of Linguistics and
Linguistic Typology, and he is the co-editor, with Greville G. Corbett, Marina Chumakina, and Dunstan Brown, of
Archi: Complexities of Agreement in Cross-Theoretical Perspective (OUP, 2016).
Irina Nikolaeva is a Professor of Linguistics at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests are linguistic typology, syntax, morphology, information structure, and non-transformational theories of grammar, as well as the documentation and description of endangered Uralic, Altaic, and Palaeosiberian languages. Her recent books include
Objects and Information Structure (with Mary Dalrymple; CUP, 2011) and
A Grammar of Tundra Nenets (de Gruyter, 2014).
Summary
This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive cross-linguistic overview of an understudied typological phenomenon, the clause-level argument-like behaviour of internal possessors. In some languages, adnominal possessors - or a subset thereof - figure more prominently than expected in the phrase-external syntax, by controlling predicate agreement and/or acting as a switch-reference pivot in same-subject relations. There is no independent evidence that such possessors are external to the possessive phrase or that they assume head status within it. This creates a puzzle for virtually all syntactic theories, as it is generally believed that agreement and switch-reference target phrasal heads rather than dependents.
Following an introduction to the typology of the phenomenon and an overview of possible syntactic analyses, chapters in the volume offer more focussed case studies from a wide range of languages spoken in the Americas, Eurasia, South Asia, and Australia. The contributions are largely based on novel data collected by the authors and present thorough discussions of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of prominent internal possessors in the relevant languages.
The volume will be of interest to researchers and students from graduate level upwards in the fields of comparative linguistics, syntax, typology, and semantics.
