Deconstructing possession

Abstract

The paper argues that Possession is to be decomposed into three distinct syntactic configurations, each associated with its own meaning. These include Temporary Location, represented as an ordinary small clause, the Part-Whole relation, which always has a complement structure within DP as its source, and an applicative structure ApplP, the source of inalienable possession, where humans are treated as special. The analysis we propose extends to English, but focuses on Palestinian Arabic, a language which overtly distinguishes a number of ingredients which in other languages enter into Possession less transparently: it is 'analytic' with respect to HAVE, it marks Temporary Location and Part-Whole relations by distinct prepositions, and it features a scope-marking poor agreement / rich agreement distinction. The picture which emerges is partly familiar and partly new. We argue that the subject in possessive clauses is a derived subject in the alienable, inalienable, and Part-Whole relations, but not necessarily in the non-human locative relation, where raising to specIP is governed by considerations of economy and variation in the morpho-syntax of agreement. We also argue that clausal possession has a DP as its source, but only on the Part-Whole construal, drawing on previous work on the DP-internal semantics of possession. Finally, the applicative structure, on our conception, may be basic, or derived by head-movement, as it is in English, and it may be headed by an overt preposition, or simply contain an abstract head, as it does in PA. If we are correct, the difference between HAVE and BE may further reduce to parametric realization of prepositions in ApplP. The analysis we develop leads to a new division of labor between phi-features and the triggers for A-movement, according to which phi-features exert their effect on syntax only from the interfaces. Whereas rich agreement fixes scope, visible at LF, the EPP, as such, is regulated only at PF. Deconstructing PossessionBoneh & Sichel 2 Deconstructing PossessionNora Boneh and Ivy Sichel IntroductionThe term 'possession' typically conflates a variety of notions. The relations which may be expressed by English HAVE, for example, stretch beyond inalienable and alienable possession, in (1a-c), to include also Temporary Location of various sorts, in (1d-f):(1) a.The tree has many branches b.John has three kids c. John has three blankets d. Mary has the car e. John has three blankets on him f. The tree has three nests *(in it)The grammatical realization of these relations is governed by several conditions having to do with whether the possessee is definite, whether the possessor DP denotes a human, and whether the head noun denotes a function. Our goal here is to identify the underlying syntactic structures and the procedures which derive the semantic relations with which they are associated.Following up on the syntactic decomposition in Hornstein et al. (1995), and bringing it to bear relation, which we take to be broader than inalienable possession, and a Tem...

Quantifier Scope in Russian

“…The conclusions in Bobaljik & Wurmbrand (2012), again, clearly point to the former. Limiting our attention in this paper for the most part to the data from just two languages, English and Russian, the answer similarly appears to be that scope ambiguity in multiply quantified sentences is the norm, therefore scope freezing, which is found in the English Double Object Construction (Larson 1990) and the Spray-Load Alternation (Schneider-Zioga 1988) and Russian ditransitives (Antonyuk 2015;forthcoming;Boneh & Nash 2017) is what really needs to be explained. If this idea is on the right track, the implication is that there must be a reason, similar or different, for why German sentences (to the exclusion of Inverse Linking, the von Stechow examples and some others) 16 are generally judged unambiguous.…”

“…17 This explanation in general also seems to accord well with the history of the study of quantification in linguistics: English was also argued to be scopally unambiguous, in the sense of scopal relations being determined purely by those allowed by surface c-command relations (Reinhart 1976). My hope in this paper is, then, that having moved past the stage of initial misclassification of Russian, we can now try to resolve the truly puzzling, and as of yet outstanding questions, such as what causes real scope freezing in both English (Schneider-Zioga 1988;Larson 1990) and Russian (Antonyuk 2015;forthcoming;Boneh & Nash 2017).…”

The development of the universal perfect in Arabic

“…In Egyptian, for example, la 'is found in inalienable contexts, and with an inanimate possessor', as opposed to la in Levantine and Yemenite dialects, where 'it is only found in set expressions and for abstract possession' (Naïm 2007:674). Similarly, Boneh and Sichel (2010) claim that la only ever expresses inalienable possession in Palestinian, with ʕind, by contrast, able to express both inalienable and alienable possessive relations. An illustration of this split in the choice of predicate employed is illustrated in 20 from Palestinian.…”

Instrumental prepositions and case: Contexts of occurrence and alternations with datives

“…In other words slightly different restrictions may be imposed on the basic genitive content of the two elements (cf. Boneh & Sichel 2010 for Palestinian Arabic; Manzini & Franco 2016: 211). 2 As before, issues arise in regard to deverbal nominalizations.…”