Synchrony and Diachrony of the Bulgarian Predicative Possession Constructions

The paper investigates the system of predicative possession in Bulgarian from a Slavic and Balkan perspective. The constructions are described in terms of their semantic and syntactic properties and several generalizations are made about the distribution of possessive features such as alienable vs inalienable and permanent vs temporary. In the second part of paper, I bring forward some observations about the diachrony of the Bulgarian predicative possessive constructions and their potential (Slavic or Balkan) source.


Introduction
Bulgarian is one of the relatively few Indo-European languages which employ both the functional verb 'to have' and the functional verb 'to be' in expressing possession on the level of predication.At first sight, these strategies seem to be in free variation, but a closer look at the constructions reveals finer-grained distinctions which point to more systematic patterns with typological significance.Among the other Indo-European languages with such a mixed strategy are Icelandic, Portuguese (Stolz et al. 2008), Lithuanian from the Baltic languages, and the East Slavic languages Belarusian and Russian (Timberlake 2014;Mazzitelli 2015).In this paper, I will discuss the properties of each possessive construction of Bulgarian and will provide several considerations about their semantic features and structural make up also in comparison with parallel Slavic and Balkan constructions.Relying on previous work (McAnallen 2009(McAnallen , 2011;;Mirchev 1971), I will also present some notes on the diachrony of these constructions as far as the history of Bulgarian is concerned.
Of the other two possible Schemes2 represented in the world's languages, the BE-Comitative possessive is quite common in Northeast Eurasia, probably as an areal feature, but also in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Austronesian and Papuan languages.Here, the possessor is coded as subject and the possessee as oblique object (in the so-called 'propriative' case or introduced by the comitative marker 'with' or the conjunction 'and').An example is given in (2): Scheme: Possessor IS/EXISTS WITH Possessum 2.
HAVE-possessives represent the most frequent Scheme in the European languages, including Slavic (apart from East Slavic).In this Scheme, the possessor is coded as subject and the possessee as object in a structure which shares characteristic properties of transitive structures, e.g. the possessor is usually sentence-initial and as such is also topical, while the possessee is sentence final and carries new information in accord with universal principles of information structure.
Gianni ha un libro.
Neither Scheme corresponds to a particular possession relation as summarized in (4).However, in every language there is a single (more) productive type (Heine 1997, 34-5): f.Inanimate inalienable -inherent, part-whole relation between inanimates qualifying as a possessor and a possessee (The tree has many branches) Even though there is no one-to-one correspondence between these subdomains of possessive meanings and their morphosyntactic encoding across languages, Stassen (2009) tries to capture variation in terms of stable structural patterns.He identifies two bivalent semantic features, namely [±control] and [±permanent contact], in order to describe the fundamental distinction between alienable (4a,b,c,d) and inalienable possession (4e,f).3) reflects a well-known division among have-and be-languages (Isačenko 1974).However, many languages, including Slavic, feature split possession systems (Stolz et al. 2008) with more than one Scheme realized under different semantic or syntactic conditions.In Russian, for example, the u+Gen and the have-construction split the functional domain of predicative possession along the lines of a distinction between concrete (4a,b,c) vs abstract (4d) possession, 3 with the latter assuming a higher prominence than the alienable-inalienable distinction or the permanent-temporary distinction.Quite the opposite situation is found in Turkish where what seems to be crucial for the use of a genitive construction as opposed to a locative one is not so much a motivation pertaining to the possessee (concrete vs abstract, alienable vs inalienable) but rather the time-span of the possessive relation, i.e. whether it is permanent or temporary (relevant at the moment or for a restricted period of time, Stolz et al. 2008, 457 ff.).
3 Have-constructions in Russian, as is well-known, are much more infrequent and are limited to the expression of abstract possessees in constructions like иметь право/ веру/смысл/доверие 'be right, have belief/sense/confidence', also with nouns bearing the suffixes -stvo or -ostь (Yurayong 2015, 6-7).To the extent that иметь 'to have' can be used also in other possessive constructions, it can never express either temporary or inalienable possession, cf.*Я имею книгу, но она не моя, а Маши 'I have a book but it's not mine, it's Masha's', *Я имею дочь 'I have a daughter'.

Predicative Possession in Bulgarian
Interestingly, Bulgarian realizes each and all of the three Schemes illustrated above, even though it is considered basically a have-language (together with West Slavic and South Slavic).

The HAVE Scheme
For sure the HAVE Scheme is the dominant one in the contemporary language.It covers all sorts of possessive relations ranging from concrete, physical possessees to abstract ones, body-part relations, kinship terminology, etc.As (5) shows, have-possessives can take controllable as well as inherent possessees, which essentially means that they are underspecified with respect to the feature [control]:
The distribution of imam 'have'-possessives in Bulgarian conforms to Stassen's (2009, 63-4) generalization that if a language makes use of the HAVE Scheme, then temporary possession will also be expressed by means of the verb 'have' in this language. 4In ( 6), for example, the possessees apartment and textbook need not be owned by the possessor (Ivan), they can be something Ivan possesses for a limited period of time or at reference time, this being left to context.
Have-possessives thus are underspecified also with respect to [±permanent] possession.

6.
Ivan ima apartament/učebnik/motor, no toj ne e negov 'Ivan has an apartment/a textbook/a moto but it's not his'.Some European languages rely on definiteness marking in order to convey temporary possession of concrete or physical objects (cf.e.g.English, Italian John has the car, Gianni ha la macchina).This strategy is unavailable in Bulgarian.Have-possessives are built up on the existential structural pattern: both involve an imam-verb (personal or impersonal, respectively), and both show identical definiteness restrictions on the post-verbal NP.As (7) shows, the possessee, much like the figure of the existential construction (8), must be a bare in-4 This generalization has a diachronic explanation: have-possessives, which are relatively late constructs in the Indo-European area as compared to locational/dative be-possessives, tend to derive etymologically from verbs like grab, hold, carry, all of which express temporary actions (Baldi, Nuti 2010 for Latin, Grković-Major 2011 for Old Church Slavonic).
definite or one that is accompanied by a "weak" determiner, such as a/one and some; definite or "strong" determiners are infelicitous in both contexts:
The identical syntax of possessives and existentials is clearly distinct from that of locatives which rely on the copula BE, e.g.Kolata e v garaža 'The car is in the garage'.This argues against the unification of possessives, locatives and existentials based on their presumed conceptual closeness (Freeze 1992), at least as far as Bulgarian is concerned.Prima facie, the three structures do not seem to be transformationally related either, i.e. imam 'have' does not result from incorporation of sâm 'I am' and the preposition v/u 'at', as argued by Benveniste (1966) and much further work: "avoir n'est rien autre qu'un être-à inversé" (197).The relevance of the above observations will become clear in section 3.3, which will present the locative-possessive BE construction with an inverse order and definiteness marking on the possessee.

The WITH Predicative Possession Construction
A BE-verb is implicated in another possessive scheme of Bulgarian -the Comitative Scheme realized with the preposition s 'with'.See (9).To judge from Mazzitelli (2015), comitative prepositions are only marginally employed in the Slavic area as a possessive device.She notes similar constructions in Belarusian, and in Lithuanian from the Baltic languages not illustrated here for lack of space. 5 5 Lithuanian seems to allow for the Comitative Scheme (s + Instrumental case) in more contexts as compared to Belarusian (Mazzitelli 2015, 124ff.)The comitative6 possessives of Bulgarian pattern with imam 'have'-possessives in all relevant respects: the possessor is coded as the subject, and the possessee as object, here as object of the preposition s 'with'.Definiteness restrictions apply here too (as well as concomitant topicfocus information properties): the object/possessee is necessarily either a bare indefinite or a non-specific indefinite with a "weak" determiner (see 9b).This speaks in favor of another generalization of Stassen (2009, 154), namely that if a language expresses a certain control relation via a transitive HAVE structure, this language may grammaticalize other possessive types to a transitive pattern (notwithstanding the presence of the BE verb often argued to be intransitive, Myler 2014).( 9) above illustrates the range of possessees that can appear in the WITH-construction: physical, portable objects, but also abstract possessees (qualities, feelings, diseases etc.).7 As in the have-constructions, both alienables and inalienables are licit as possessees implying that here, too, the features of [control] and [permanent contact] are underspecified.However, the functional equivalence of the two constructions breaks down when it comes to the expression of a kinship relation: (10b) is not grammatical, so the only way to express a kinship relation in Bulgarian is by using imam 'have'.This difference is important.It shows that syntax may manipulate differently body parts (9) and kinship terms (10) and that the withconstruction (of Bulgarian at least) is sensitive to such semantic distinctions. 9Body-parts, alongside physical and abstract possessions, belong to the so-called "personal sphere" of the possessor (Bally 1926), while kinship terms, being animate themselves, are expected to act more as true comitative objects (see fn. 6) rather than as "objects" of association.Wherever these semantic restrictions are violable (fn.8), definitness effects distinguish clearly the pure accompaniment (symmetric) reading from the possessive (asymmetric) reading (cf.Arkhipov 2009): 11. a. Tja e na razxodka s dete*(to) si 'She is taking a walk with the/her child'.
b. Tja e s dete(*to) = Tja ima dete litt.'She is with a child' = 'She has a child'.
Cross-linguistically, functional (grammaticalized) prepositions like with have special case requirements as compared to lexical ones.For example, in Icelandic, similar predicative structures built with the use of the prepsotion með 'with' take the accusative for relations of control/temporary possession, and the dative for symmetric/accompaniment relations (Levison 2011, 390). 10As a case-less language, Bulgarian renders this distinction via a difference in definiteness features.Cf. also (12) which gives other contexts for the companion reading all of which require definiteness marking on the companion.
12. a. Igraja si s dete*(to) play-1sg refl with child-det 'I am playing with the/my child' b.Objadvam s dete*(to) have-linch-1sg with child-det 'I am having lunch with the/my child'.9 Crosslinguistically, body part terms do not share much with kinship terms even though both are relational nouns, and both are specified as [-control].Only body parts are considered in relation to a whole (the possessor), which is why in many languages they show a different behavior as compared to kinship (Lehmann 2016).
John is with child-the.acchis 'John has his child.' (i.e.holding baby, baby in a carriage, leading by hand, etc.) b.Jón er með barninu sínu.
John is with child-the.dathis 'John is together with his child.' (child is accompanying John by free will).

The Locational Possessive
The third type of possessive structure in Bulgarian is illustrated in (13) and is very different in both meaning and structure from the above two models.It is patterned according to the same locational model found in Modern Russian involving the unaccusative verb/ copula BE 11 and the same preposition u 'at'.Although etymologically related to the locative preposition v 'in' (goal or location), 12 the two differ in semantic specialization: u 'at' combines with animate possessors/locations only, while v 'in' is the regular locative preposition introducing places (or times), e.g.Knigata e v škafa 'The book is in the closet'.To distinguish the two prepositional usage, I will label the u-construction 'locational' (rather than locative): (13) is the mirror image of the respective Russian construction ( 14).
The differences relate to linear ordering (possessee > possessor, as opposed to the pattern possessor > possessee of Russian), and to the topic-focus interpretation of the two participants in the possessive relation.In the Bulgarian construction, the possessee is coded as the more prominent argument, receiving topichood via the definiteness marking. 14In the Russian construction, on the other hand, these relations are reversed: the locative argument (i.e. the u-posses-11 For lack of space I do not discuss here the meaning of BE. 12 Pavlović (2005) cited in Yurayong (2013, 14) reconstructs both prepositions to Proto-Slavic *wъ(-).
13 According to Stolz et al. (2008, 442), the distinction between presence and absence of the copula in Russian has to do with tense as well as with the type of the possessee: if the possessee is semantically or pragmatically specified, est' does not occur; if it is generic or pragmatically neutral, est' becomes obligatory: 14 The alternative (possessor > possessee) order is also available but is driven by information structure requirements.In that case, the possessor gets contrastively focussed, which I take to mean that it has been moved from its base position for the discourse purposes (i).Note that in the inverted order the distribution of definiteness features is preserved.sor) is topicalized, while the possessee carries the new information of the predicative relation.But the biggest difference between ( 13) and ( 14) is semantic.The basic function of the Bulgarian construction is to signal possessive location, not ownership.( 13) does not say anything about the precise location of the book -it could be at Ivan's place, home, or in his immediate surroundings. 15In other words, what we have here can be referred to as an imprecise 'animate location', rather than as ascription of a possessive relation.The Bulgarian construction is thus akin to the Russian locational possessive, e.g.Kniga u Ivana 'The book is at/with Ivan', which is the reverse of ( 14) above (with obligatory cancellation of the copula est', Partee and Borschev 2008, see also Jung 2008).Unlike Russian however, Bulgarian (13) has no transformational counterpart parallel to ( 14) so must restort to the imam 'have' contruction instead (cf.ex.(5) above).
The main properties of the Bulgarian u-possessives can be summarized as follows: a) possessor is obligatorily animate, cf. the ungrammaticality of (15), and is introduced by the special preposition u 'at' reserved for animates; b) possessee is obligatorily inanimate; c) the construction cannot be used to express ownership (permanent possession), cf.(16a), and neither inalienable possession, cf.(16b).According to Mazzittelli (2015, 28), cases in English like He has a passport with him, He has money on him, with a locational or comitative adjunct indicating the location, instantiate Physical possession: they provide information about the location of the possessee but 15 Much more infrequent, although not impossible, are constructions with indefinite possessees (i), which however need to be specific: (i) Edin/*njakakâv ključ e u Ivan.one /*some key is at Ivan 'Ivan has a key/one of the keys' (i) can also be rendered as (ii): (ii) Ima edin/njakakâv ključ u Ivan has-impers.one/some key at Ivan 'There is one/some key at Ivan' = 'Ivan has one of the keys/some key'.In the existential construction (ii), the temporary animate location is signaled with the the same preposition, u 'at' which introduces the possessor in (i).Inanimate locations require different prepositions -v 'in' or na 'on': cf.Ima gnezdo v hralupata/na dârvoto.'There is a nest in the tree hollow/on the tree'.

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Studi di linguistica slava, 235-256 do not instantiate [+control] by the possessor.However, it seems to me that Bulgarian ( 14) are borderline cases.Even though the above English expressions will be translated with Pasportât mu e nego/ Parite sa u nego, using the u-possessive, the Bulgarian construction does not require coreference between possessor and possessee.See (17a).The whole idea of the construction is to show that the possessor, which, as mentioned above, must necessarily be animate, a) has control over a physical object that is relatively small and thus portable and b) that the control relation is available for a limited period of time, not necessarily coinciding with utterance time as in English.This period can be past or future with respect to utterance time, and can be signalled by temporal adverbials (17a), which in general are not available with have-possessives (cf.17b).

17.
a. Parite ti bjaxa u Ivan cjala sedmitsa money.detyour were at Ivan whole week lit.'Your/The money was at Ivan's place/home/etc.for the whole week' ('Ivan had/kept your money for the whole week') b. *Ivan imaše pari cjala sedmitsa 'Ivan had money for the whole week'.
The following table summarizes the various possessive constructions examined so far.Based on semantic and distributional criteria, we can formulate the following three way distinction regulating the Bulgarian predicative possession system: • If the possessee is a physical object, the first distinction is the one which divides the possessees along the lines of the perrmanent vs temporary distinction -permanent possessees (those that can be owned) require the use of the verb imam 'have'; temporary objects located within the sphere of an animate possessor require the use of an u-locative.
• The second distinction divides the possessees along the lines of concrete vs kinship vs abstract.Permanent possession of conrete objects and kinship "possession" is conceptualized as more restricted in that it makes use of a single (HAVE) construction.Abstract possession on the other hand has two constructions at its disposal: the HAVE construction and the comitative/associative WITH-construction.• The third distinction divides the possessors in terms of animacy: here, two constructions are available, HAVE possessives, and WITH-possessives, while the locational u-construction is excluded.
These distinctions can be represented with the following diagram: 18.
The generalization that emerges from this diagram is that the only three possessive types that dispose of a single construction in Bulgarian are a) ownership relations, b) kinship relations, and c) locational relations of temporary possession.Apart from these three basic types, the language makes use of alternative strategies, presumably because of the need to specify finer-grained distinctions.The second generalization that can be made regards the functional coverage of the typologically more special WITH-possessive.It is plausible to hypothesize that the associative meaning of the with-construction is a (metaphorical) extension of its prototypical original comitative meaning.However, this extension has not been pervasive enough to alter both the feature [+control] as well as the feature [+permanent contact], leaving HAVE as the only strategy for expressing the prototypical possessive concept of ownership.

Old Church Slavonic Predicative Possession
The detailed studies of McAnallen (2009McAnallen ( , 2011) ) reveals that Old Church Slavonic had 3 basic predicative possession constructions (see also Grković-Major 2011): a dative PPC, an ou+Genitive PPC, and a third one with the verb have.These are illustrated in ( 19)-( 21):

19.
мьнѣ естъ 'mihi est'/moi ™st… a. i ne bě ima čęda poneže bě elisavetĭ neplody i oba and not was-aor.3sgthem-dat.duchild for was-aor.3sgElisabeth fruitlessnom.sgand both zamatorěvŭša vĭ dĭnexŭ svoixŭ běašete advanced-nom.du in day-loc.plrefl.loc.plwere-impf.3du'And they did not have a child for Elisabeth was infertile and both were advanced in their days.'[lit.'there was no child to them'] (Lk 1:7, Duridanov et al. 1993, 461)  These three types have partially overlapping properties as far as their functional specialization is concerned.The studies of McAnallen (2009McAnallen ( , 2011) ) have revealed some important generalizations with reference to the New Testament Greek source construction.The quite frequent dative construction, presumably inherited from Proto-Slavic, followed the general Indo-European model мьнѣ естъ -mihi est (Latin) -ἐμοί ἔστι moi ™st… (Greek), 16 and was the only one to as- McAnallen also notes (2011,167) that the meaning of the dative predicative possessive construction often overlaps with the recipient (or goal) reading associated with the Slavic dative case.Therefore, several dative + 'be' constructions can be interpreted in multiple ways: as a predicative possessive, as a construction where the dative argument is either literally or metaphorically affected by the nominative argument (ex-sert the existence of an inalienable relation between two entities, typically between kinship terms (19a).This construction was also used for other inalienables (20b), as well as for abstract states of animate Possessors (19b).The iměti 'have'-construction, which was the main competitor of the possessive dative and is judged by McAnnallen (2011) to be the default OCS predicative possessive structure, was predominantly used to indicate ownership and permanent possession (20b) though it could also be used to express abstract possession (20c).This last usage recalls the distributional preferences of the corresponding Modern Russian imet'-construction.
The locative possessive ou-construction exemplifed in ( 21) was sometimes used as a variant of the possessive dative construction (compare (21) from Codex Assemanianus, 11th c., with (19b), which renders the same passage but from Codex Marianus, beginning of the 11th c.).According to McAnallen (2011) and Khodova (1966), the OCS ou-possessive preserved the locative semantics of its Proto Slavic ancestor and was therefore used specifically in contexts allowing for a locative interpretation of the original Greek construction (possessive dative in most cases, see e.g. the Greek source sentence in ( 21)).Another property revealed by McAnallen (2011, 164) is that the ou-possessive genitive conveyed a rather concrete semantics and as such would typically occur with possessees that are physical and countable, conceptualized as close to/within reach of the possessor.In other words, the locative construal of OCS predicative possession featured transitory properties or impermanent possession, with the possessee interpreted as belonging to a (controlling) possessor.

Notes on the Diachrony of the Locational Possessive of Bulgarian
As far as the development of the locational possessive in Bulgarian is concerned, Mirchev (1971) notes that the ou-Gen(itive) construction, as evident from the few but quite significant examples in the earliest available written texts, was quite stable during 9th-11th centuries (OCS/Old Bulgarian).The construction continued to be used during Middle Bulgarian (12th-14th centuries) in spite of the constantly increasing use of the transitive iměti 'have'-construction.The several Medieval texts examined by Mirchev from the 13th and 14th centuries 17 demonstrate that the locative construction was preserved ternal possession), as a construction where there is some directed purpose or intention to the dative argument, or as a mixture of these senses.
17 Namely, the Dobreyshovo gospel, a 13th c. illuminated manuscript, the Manassieva Chronicle, a 14th c., and the Troya legend, a 14th c. copy.These texts have been cho-

Iliyana Krapova Synchrony and Diachrony of the Bulgarian Predicative Possession Constructions
at least until the 14th c.Interestingly, these texts show that it was used to ascribe possession, especially in reference to kinship relations, whose primary exponent in the earlier periods was, as mentioned, the possessive dative.Compare for example (19a) and ( 22).This shows that around the 13th-14th centuries the ou-construction must have expanded its earlier locational core and has come to signal inalienable possession.After that period, it disappeared, according to Mirchev, and was entirely supplanted by the have-construction.
According to Lyons (1967), the distinction between locatives and possessives is a matter of language specific development having to do with the distinction between animate and inanimate nouns.Indeed, as Lyons noted, whether u A B gets translated as 'A has B'-possessive, or as 'There is a B near A'-existential locative, depends very largely upon whether A is a personal noun or not.Recall that in Modern Bulgarian the u-locational is paraphrasable with an existential construction ima u X 'it has at X' (fn.15).We can thus hypothesize that after the 14th c. the older ou-Gen did not disappear completely from the grammar of Bulgarian but got instead reanalyzed as an animate locational possessive in reference to just one type of possession, namely temporary possession of concrete, physical objects.It is precisely this narrow functional specialization that allowed for the retention of the original locative flavor of the OCS/OB ou-Gen construction, while the association with animacy ('animate location') was strengthened by other internal factors such as the grammaticalization of the category of definiteness.The latter was decisive for the linear ordering (possessee > possessor) discussed in 3.3.Plausibly, the process could have been reinforced by external influences as well.Contact convergences are wide-spread in the area of possession.Sometimes the preservation of an original feature can be reinforced due to contact with neighboring languages.For example, Yurayong (2013) argues that the Russian u-locative is a descendent of the common Slavic/OCS ou-locative and that its dominance in East Slavic is due to contact between speakers of Old Russian/East Slavic and speakers of Finnic, where a similar construction exists with adessive case in place of the Slavic genititve. 18sen because of their more colloquial style allowing for a better view on the natural development of the language.
18 An alternative view holds that the construction was carried over to Old Russian from the Finnish substrate.(Yurayong 2013citing Venkeer 1967;Kiparsky 1969).
Later Slavs who wandered toward the northeast started preferring the selection of the locative type under pressure from their new neighbours, speakers of Finno-Ugric languages who did not originally have any kind of habeo-verb in their languages.According to the same principle, the other Slavic groups, which have remained in the nuclear Europe, gave up the use of the locative type and started following the trend of their mighty neighbours -the speakers of Indo-European have-languages, e.g Germanic, Romance and Greek -in multifunctionalising the habeo-verb.(Yurayong 2013, 25) All Slavic languages have developed predicative structures that are similar to that of their non-Slavic neighbors (McAnallen 2011;Yurayong 2019).Contact-induced reinforcement might be involved also in the case of the Bulgarian locative.Its salient temporary possession semantics could have been preserved through contact with neighboring Turkish.It is well-known that Turkic languages encode temporary possession with a locative construction with no indexing on the possessee, often appearing as an alternative to the common genitive pattern with indexing on the possessee.

23.
a. Mehmed'in para-si yok Mehmed-gen money-his not exist 'Mehmed has no money'.(Lewis 1967, 251, cited in Stassen 2009, 200) b.Ben-dé para var 1sg-loc money be-there-pres.'I have money (with me)'.(Swift 1963, 139, cited in Stassen 2009, 200) The locative pattern in (23b) usually indicates temporary possession, or availability, and is typically used if the possessee is an alienable noun (Croft 2012, 133).This pattern is more often preferred in languages that are in intense contact with Slavic (Nevskaya 1997).It is well-known that Balkan languages interacted intensely with Turkish during the Ottoman rule on the Balkans (14-19th c.).Given this, my tentative hypothesis is that Turkish and Bulgarian could have influenced each other in reinforcing the retention of a locative construction which plausibly was of communicative relevance for the purposes of contact.Of course, further work is needed in order to substantiate this hypothesis from point of view of Balkan linguistics.

6
Associative WITH-Possession: A Contact-induced Change?
There are no traces of a WITH-possessive predicative structure in OB/OCS; only attributive usages as in ( 24) are attested also available in the modern language.This points that the spread of the comitative However, this is not the case of Romanian, and neither of Modern Greek where the associative/comitative possessives are far less widespread than in Bulgarian and Albanian.In Greek, for example, the construction is preferred for ascribing possession of attributes/properties to inanimate objects but requires a special context in order to be felicitous with animate possessors (Krapova, Turano 2018).Such variation is surprising.Balkan languages have grammaticalizaed their respective functional preposition with in parallel ways (Assenova 2002, 102), so it is not clear why the extention of this marker to predicative possession is a matter of partial rather than full convergence.Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that all Balkan languages display a clear preference for comitative-based constructions in attributive possession structures.Stolz et al. (2008) show that while all Indo-European languages can express (26a) with a corresponding with-construction, language groups within the Indo-European family are divided into preferences for coding (26b) in the same way.This 19 In OCS, comitativity/association was expressed via the instrumental or the withconstruction, the two being in competition (Haralampiev 2001).The latter construction gained quickly ground as early as the 10th-11th c., and soon supplanted the instrumental both formally, i.e. through the use of the preposition sŭ, and functionally (full syncretism).
suggest an areal rather than a genetic account.Significantly, all Balkan languages make a consistent use of the WITH-strategy for their equivalents of (26b): If attributive possession relying on a WITH-strategy is a possible source for the development of the predicative WITH-strategy, the fact that only Bulgarian and Albanian have extended their parallels of (26b) clausal structure must be due to language internal factors.Apart from Bulgarian and Albanian, the other two Indo-European languages that have grammaticalized the WITH-structure in the domain of predicative possession are Icelandic and Portuguese (Levinson 2011;Stolz et al. 2008).The highest degree of comitative grammaticalization is seen in Icelandic where the with-possessive is in complementary distribution with have and restricts its functional domain.Thus, while hafa 'have' requires the specification of a location, eiga 'own' is preferred to specify ownership, 20 while vera með 'be with' is reserved for temporary possession: diseases, portable objects, accessories, but it can also be used to denote inalienables such as body parts (Friðjónsson 1978, cited in Levinson 2011).

Conclusion
The Balkan languages do not show Icelandic-style variation in the use of their comitative constructions with respect to the default HAVEconstruction.Still, it is significant that these languages, which are well-known to belong to the Balkan Sprachbund (Assenova 2002), exploit alternative strategies, albeit to a varying degree, for at least three possessive types: a) abstract possession of properties, feelings, diseases, etc. (Albanian, Bulgarian); b) temporary possession of physical objects (Bulgarian), and c) associative/locational relations involving inanimates, e.g.The apartment is with two rooms (Bulgarian, Albanian, Modern Greek).In neither language are these alternatives available for the expression of ownership, the prototypical instance of permanent possession.The convergences point that on the Balkans, the more fundamental split between alienable and inalienable possession has been "enriched" or supplanted by finer grained distinctions regarding a) properties or characteristics attributed to a location -and thus expressing what Stassen (2009, 55) labels a "con-20 However, it can also express family relations.

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Studi di linguistica slava, 235-256 tainer-contained" relation -or b) properties, feelings and temporary states (like diseases) pertaining to human individuals and their socalled "personal sphere" (Bally 1926).As such, these relations must have been conceptualized as a (metaphorical) form of possession and grammaticalized as an alternative strategy with respect to the already dominant HAVE strategy.The distributional and frequency differences may be related to different source constructions and to different degrees of grammaticalization.
It is a noteworthy fact that the permanent-temporary distinctions in the sphere of predicative possession are more relevant and thus more widespread in the remote areas of the Indo-European boundaries.These comprise Portuguese and Icelandic (Stolz et al. 2008), as well as Lithuanian 21 and Latvian whose alternative locative contructions (i.e.other than the dominant HAVE-construction) are probably retained from Indo-European but have been largely shaped by contact with Finno-Ugric in the Circum-Baltic area, the "buffer" zone between the east (Central Eurasia) and the west (Standard Average European (Wälchli 2011, 325ff).Balkan languages can thus be said to constitute another such peripheral European area, where the grammaticalization of possessive relations results from the complex interaction between individual language development and contact-induced changes.The details of how these processes took place require of course much further work.

Gustaitis mėgino dokumentais pagrįsti […] kad pirkimo metu namas jau buvęs su verandomis
'A. Gustaitis tried to demonstrate with documents that at the moment of the purchase the house already had verandas' c.Nors užpuolikas buvo su pistoletu, moteris nesutriko ir įjungė signalizaciją 'Even though the aggressor had a pistol, the woman did not hesitate and switched on the alarm'.
possession -permanent control/ownership (I have a house) b.Temporary possession -temporary control/no ownership (I have a pen but it's not mine) c.Physical possession -control at utterance time (I have a pen on me at the moment) d. Abstract possession -temporary possession of an abstract possessee (i.e.cold, hunger, I have a cold) e. Inalienable possession -inherent relationship of an animate possessor with respect to a body part or a kinship term (I have two brothers) 8 ima brat vs b. *Ivan e s brat 'John has a brother'.'Johnis with brother'.
kraka bjaxa u tozi stol four.detlegs were at this chair 'This chair had four legs'.16. a. *Knigite sa u Ivan, zaštoto te sa negovi 'The books are at Ivan because they are his own'.b. *Bradata e u Ivan vs b.Ivan ima brada/Ivan e s brada beard.det is at Ivan 'Ivan has a beard/Ivan is with beard'.
People] wander around [with dragon balls] b. [The boy with the red hair] came
Alienable possession always expresses a[+control]relation between a human possessor and some non-human possessee, while inalienable possession always involves some non-controllable or inherent relation such as kinship or partwhole relation.On the other hand, by manipulating the feature [per- manent contact] we get finer distinctions pertaining to the sphere of control (alienability).Ownership, possession in the strict sense, would differ from other types of controlled possession in the additional specification [permanent contact].Temporary possession on the other hand, being by definition a type of possession not stable in time, would thus be negatively characterized for this feature.The distribution of predicative possessive constructions in (1)-(

Krapova Synchrony and Diachrony of the Bulgarian Predicative Possession Constructions Iliyana Krapova Synchrony and Diachrony of the Bulgarian Predicative Possession Constructions
restrictions are largely irrelevant for Bulgarian comitative possessives which in any case are extremely productive, especially in colloquial speech.It can be hypothesized that Bulgarian has expanded the functional domain of the comitative possessive from temporary to permanent possession and from controllable possession to all possessive types (apart from ownership and kinship, see infra).Studi di linguistica slava, 235-256 9. a. Momičeto e s apartament/očila/s dâlga kosa/grip 'The girl is with = has got an apartment/glasses/long hair/flu'.b.Ivan e s edna kola/njakolko koli/*vsjaka kola/*kolata 'Ivan is with = has one car/several cars/*every car /*the car'.

Iliyana Krapova Synchrony and Diachrony of the Bulgarian Predicative Possession Constructions Iliyana Krapova Synchrony and Diachrony of the Bulgarian Predicative Possession Constructions
One possible explanation for the rise of the comitative also in the area of predicative possession is that it represents a shared contactinduced innovation in a Balkan context.Albanian for example has two predicative possession constructions which are in partial complementary distribution: the kam 'have'-construction and the jam me 'be with' construction.The comitative/associate construction is used when the possessee expresses a body part, a part-whole or a disease: