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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. 291–312

Grammaticalization of possessive markers in the Beserman dialect of Udmurt

| Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences
| Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences
| Universität Hamburg

The paper is focused on the functions of possessive suffixes in the Beserman dialect of Udmurt. Considering the data from the Beserman corpus of oral texts we find the parameters influencing the presence/omission of the possessive suffixes in the contexts of possessive (alienable and inalienable) and non-possessive contexts. We review the claim about the grammaticalization of the Beserman possessives into markers of definiteness, and suggest that they are subject to pragmaticization in terms of Fried (2009).

Keywords: Beserman dialect of Udmurt (Uralic), possessive suffixes, alienable and inalienable possession, grammaticalization, definiteness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Possessive morphemes in Uralic and in Beserman Udmurt
  • 3.Distribution of possessive markers with possessive function
    • 3.1Forms of possessive markers in Beserman
    • 3.2Distribution of alienable and inalienable sets of possessive markers
    • 3.3Obligatoriness and frequency of possessive markers
  • 4.Distribution of possessive markers with non-possessive function
    • 4.1Non-possessive functions of the possessive markers
    • 4.2The hypothesis of grammaticalization of possessive markers into articles
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.206.14ser
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