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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. 313–364

On belonging

Preliminary thoughts on the typology of belong-constructions

| University of Bremen
| University of Bremen

This study aims at pinpointing certain properties of belong-constructions which might prove helpful for a future cross-linguistic inquiry into the grammar of those categories which associate with the notion belong in particular and with predicative possession in general. To this end, languages from two different regions – Mexico and Europe – are reviewed as to the evidence they provide of belong-constructions and their relation to other predicative-possessive categories. Cases of areal and genetic micro-variation in the domain of belong are discussed. The methodological issue of collecting data which are usually not featured in the descriptive-linguistic literature is raised as well.

Keywords: predicative possession, BELONG-constructions, areal and genetic micro-variation, methodology of collecting data
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Questions
    • 2.1Background
    • 2.2Ideas
    • 2.3Plan of attack
  • 3.Mexico
    • 3.1Yucatec Maya
    • 3.2Areal distribution
    • 3.3Summary of the results of the Mexican case-study
  • 4.Europe
    • 4.1Germanic
    • 4.2Romance
    • 4.3Slavic
    • 4.4Sundry Indo-European languages of Europe
    • 4.5Summary of the results of the European case-study
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • Appendix
  • References
Published online: 5 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.206.15sto
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