Chapter published in:
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. 27–50

Predicative possession in revived Cornish

| University of Bremen

This study introduces the possessive schemas of revived Cornish. By means of a survey and interviews with 25 fluent speakers and a corpus study I identified several possessive schemas being employed for different purposes due to semantic and structural reasons. Possession splits, which are also attested for the other Brythonic languages (Stolz et al. 2008), occur for the distinction of temporary possession and the possession of illnesses. Furthermore, the speakers may be developing a new form to express the possession of abstract nouns by employing the short form of bos ‘to be’ and the preposition dhe ‘to’. For the development of this form the history of interrupted language transmission and the use of Cornish by New Speakers are relevant factors.

Keywords: possession, possession split, Brythonic languages, Cornish, interrupted language transmission
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus study and field research
  • 3.Previous findings revisited
  • 4.How to have things in Cornish
    • 4.1 a’m beus
    • 4.2 kavoes
    • 4.3The Goal schema
    • 4.4The Companion schema
    • 4.5The Goal schema (short form)
      • 4.5.1Res yw dhe X ‘X needs’
      • 4.5.2Use of the goal schema (short form) in spoken language
    • 4.6The Location schema
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • References
Published online: 05 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.206.03arb
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