This paper examines aspects of the evolution of possessive and existential constructions that shed interesting light on the affinities between possession and the notions underlying existential predication, comitative predication and transitive predication. The unity of the notion of possession follows from the notion of personal sphere of an individual, but the relationships between an individual and the elements of his/her personal sphere are very diverse, and sometimes ambiguous, with respect to the control exerted by the possessor. Consequently, whatever the source of a predicative construction expressing possession (existential, comitative, or transitive), its extension to the whole domain of possession implies extension to situations that differ from those encoded by the source construction in terms of control, which favors further evolutions. This explains why many languages have constructions expressing predicative possession that are fully aligned with none of the constructions that can be their historical source. Keywords: possession; existence; comitative; transitivity
2022. A semantic typology of location, existence, possession and copular verbs: areal patterns of polysemy in Mainland East and Southeast Asia. Linguistics 60:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Bentley, Delia, Francesco Maria Ciconte & Silvio Cruschina
2015. Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy,
Antonov, Anton & Guillaume Jacques
2014. Transitive NEED Does Not Imply Transitive HAVE: Response to Harves and Kayne 2012. Linguistic Inquiry 45:1 ► pp. 147 ff.
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