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Part of
A0 – The Lexical Status of Adjectives
Edited by Phoevos Panagiotidis and Moreno Mitrović
[Language Faculty and Beyond 17] 2022
► pp. 187–216

Property, possession, and adjectives

This paper rethinks the nature of possessive property concept (PC) construction which provides an account for the cross-linguistic variation regarding the constructions of possessive strategy and adjectival predication for the expression of PC predication. It is argued that the possessive PC construction in Chinese is in nature an adjectival one (in line with Y. Zhang 2020), hence is syntactically different from ownership possessive constructions. Based on Hu and Perry (2020), it is argued that the derivation of an adjective involves a possessive predication phrase (PossP) headed by a special Possessive head Poss, which establishes a possessive relationship between a subject in [Spec PossP] and a characteristic property denoted by the complement of Poss. In Chinese, the phonologically null vocabulary item (VI) of Poss feature has an insertion framework condition that requires it to be spelt-out in a complex head. This special property of Poss VI is responsible for a series of issues including the licensing conditions for bare adjectives in Chinese, the variation between Chinese and languages like English regarding the existence of possessive PC constructions, among others.
Keywords: property concept, adjectival predication, possessive construction, syntactic variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Semantic approach to possessive PC predication
  • 3.Possessive PC predication in Chinese
  • 4.The syntax of Chinese possessive PC constructions
    • 4.1You is not an adjectival functional head
    • 4.2The syntactic nature of Chinese possessive PC constructions
    • 4.3The hen licensing
    • 4.5Particle attachment and psych verb phrases
    • 4.6Additional issues in N. Zhang (2021)
  • 5.Rethinking the parametric variation of PC constructions
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Acknowledgements
Published online: 24 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.17.06hu
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