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Definitely Not Possessed? Possessive Suffixes with Definiteness Marking Function

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Frames and Concept Types

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 94))

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the definiteness marking function of the possessive suffix of some Uralic languages is not the outcome of a grammaticalization pathway but has always been inherent to them. The possessive suffix has thus two main functions: establishing a relation between entities or a relation between an entity and the discourse and indicating the definiteness of the referent of the marked noun. The interpretation of the suffix as a marker of definiteness or a marker of possession depends on the conceptual noun type of the marked noun and on the context.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Komi and Udmurt examples are taken from Edygarova (2009).

  2. 2.

    The only Uralic language with a free definite article is Hungarian (a ház, def house, ‘the house’), whereas Mordvin exhibits a morphological bound definite article. In both languages the definite article is derived from a demonstrative (Bechert 1993).

  3. 3.

    Available at http://www.univie.ac.at/negation/

  4. 4.

    Available at http://babel.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/index.php?abfrage=textcorpus_en

  5. 5.

    As proposed in Gerland and Horn (2010) the term definiteness is used to refer to the grammatical marking of uniqueness, whereas the term uniqueness represents the unique status of the referent. Thus, I will follow this distinction between the grammatical side and the semantic function. See also Ortmann (this volume).

  6. 6.

    In this case, the Russian word for “to curse” is used. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer who pointed out this case of code-switching to me.

  7. 7.

    See Vikner and Jensen (2002) for possible interpretations of possessive constructions. They distinguish between lexical and contextual interpretations of the English genitive of which the emotional interpretation is one.

  8. 8.

    Only occurrences of nouns were counted, occurrences e.g. of demonstrative pronouns were left out.

  9. 9.

    Note that this example also provides a use of the suffix which is not yet explained, namely the co-occurrence with a numeral (or indefinite article).

Abbreviations

abl :

Ablative

acc :

Accusative

all :

Allative

dat :

Dative

dem :

Demonstrative

demin :

Deminutivum/Diminutive

emph :

Emphasis

ep :

Epenthetic vowel

exl :

Exclamative

gen :

Genitive

imp :

Imperative

ine :

Inessive

inf :

Infinitive

ins :

Instrumental

lat :

Lative

loc :

Locative

narr :

Narrative

neg :

Negation

obj :

Objective conjugation

part :

Participle

pf :

Perfect

ptpass :

Participium passivum

prosec :

Prosecutive

prs/pst :

Present

prt :

Preterite

sub :

Subjective conjugation

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Acknowledgements

The research for this article was supported by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) grant Research Unit FOR 600 “Functional Concepts and Frames”. I would like to thank Christian Horn, Sebastian Löbner, Albert Ortmann and Melani Wratil for discussion, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Linguistics and Information Science, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, Düsseldorf, 40225, Germany

    Doris Gerland

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  1. Doris Gerland
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Information Science, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Thomas Gamerschlag

  2. Department of Linguistics and Information Science, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Doris Gerland

  3. Department of Linguistics and Information Science, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Rainer Osswald

  4. Department of Linguistics and Information Science, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Wiebke Petersen

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Gerland, D. (2014). Definitely Not Possessed? Possessive Suffixes with Definiteness Marking Function. In: Gamerschlag, T., Gerland, D., Osswald, R., Petersen, W. (eds) Frames and Concept Types. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 94. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01541-5_12

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