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Possession in Languages of Europe and North and Central Asia
Edited by Lars Johanson, Lidia Federica Mazzitelli and Irina Nevskaya
[Studies in Language Companion Series 206] 2019
► pp. 7–26

Expressing ‘possession’

Motivations, meanings, and forms

| James Cook University , Australia

Competing motivations are often at work in the choice of form and meaning of possessive and associative noun phrases. The article offers a broad typological review of the ways of expressing possession at the NP-internal level. In particular, it discusses how iconicity and economic motivations interact in determining the shape of NP-internal possessive expressions, also addressing the topics of how socio-cultural factors affect the grammar of possession and how societal changes are reflected in language variation.

Keywords: adnominal possession, possession and association, iconicity, economic motivation, socio-cultural motivation
Article outline
  • 1.Possession, ownership, and association
  • 2.Forms and meanings in possessive constructions: Iconic and economic motivation
    • 2.1Iconic motivation in expressing possession: Some examples
    • 2.2Iconic motivation and the specificity of a noun referent
    • 2.3Economic motivation in possessive constructions
    • 2.4The special status of speech act participants
    • 2.5Non-possessive meanings in possessive constructions
  • 3.How the expression of possession reflects societal practices
  • 4.Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.206.02aik
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