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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. 267–290

A diachronic perspective on alienability splits in Icelandic attributive possession

| University of Bremen

Icelandic makes use of different morphosyntactic patterns for different kinds of possessive relations both in predicative and attributive possession. The fact that this differentiation is at least partly motivated by the semantics of the possessum suggests an alienability split in the Icelandic possession system (Stolz 2008). There are various approaches to explain the formal distinctions in the system, one of them depending on grammaticalization processes. Following this approach, a diachronic perspective needs to be taken in order to understand how splits arise. Accordingly, this paper presents the results of a corpus-linguistic and frequency-based analysis of the attributive pronominal possessive system of Icelandic. The most significant finding to emerge is that splits in the possessive system do not only manifest in a different synchronic behaviour but also in different degrees of susceptibility to language-internal and/or contact-induced changes.

Keywords: split possession, Icelandic, diachrony, grammaticalization, language contact
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Alienable and inalienable possession
  • 3.Icelandic
    • 3.1Pronominal possession in modern Icelandic
  • 4.Diachronic analysis
    • 4.1Alienable possession
    • 4.2Kinship
    • 4.3Body parts
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • Source texts (Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus)
  • References
  • Online sources
Published online: 5 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.206.13sch
References

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