Part of
Europe and the Mediterranean as Linguistic Areas: Convergencies from a historical and typological perspectiveEdited by Paolo Ramat and Elisa Roma
[Studies in Language Companion Series 88] 2007
► pp. 159–182
Although possession is one of the most widely studied topics in linguistics, this is not true of pronominal possession and emphatic pronominal possession. The present paper is a survey of the different morphosyntactic strategies adopted to express both emphatic pronominal possession and inalienability in a representative sample of European and Mediterranean languages. The primary focus is to investigate possible connections among areally contiguous languages which belong to different groups and families and are often typologically distant.