Approaches to Predicative Possession

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.

Gréte Dalmi is Lecturer at the University of Technology, Budapest, Hungary.
Jacek Witkos is Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland.
Piotr Ceglowski is Associate Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland.

1. Introduction, Gréte Dalmi (University of Technology, Hungary)
2. Genitive of negation in Polish possessive and locative existential sentences: A testing tool for Case Overwriting and Case Projections and derivational phases, Jacek Witkos (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland)
3. Extraction of possessive NP-complements and the structure of the nominal domain in Polish, Piotr Ceglowski (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland)
4. The definiteness effect in Russian existential and possessive sentences, Olga Kagan (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
5. Predicative possession in Belarusian, a mixed BE/HAVE language, Egor Tsedryk (Saint Mary's University, Canada)
6. Predicative possession as a clause type in Finnish, Maria Vilkuna (University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland)
7. The argument structure of BE-possessives in Hungarian, Gréte Dalmi (University of Technology, Hungary)
8. Predicative possession in Permic, Nikolett F. Gulyás (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)
9. Existential possession in Meadow Mari, Alexandra Simonenko (University of Ghent, Belgium)
10. Predicative possessive constructions in Selkup dialects, Beáta Wagner-Nagy (University of Hamburg, Germany)
11. Conclusion, Jacek Witkos (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland)
Index