Full Description
This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive cross-linguistic overview of an understudied typological phenomenon, the clause-level argument-like behaviour of internal possessors. In some languages, adnominal possessors - or a subset thereof - figure more prominently than expected in the phrase-external syntax, by controlling predicate agreement and/or acting as a switch-reference pivot in same-subject relations. There is no independent evidence that such possessors are external to the possessive phrase or that they assume head status within it. This creates a puzzle for virtually all syntactic theories, as it is generally believed that agreement and switch-reference target phrasal heads rather than dependents.
Following an introduction to the typology of the phenomenon and an overview of possible syntactic analyses, chapters in the volume offer more focussed case studies from a wide range of languages spoken in the Americas, Eurasia, South Asia, and Australia. The contributions are largely based on novel data collected by the authors and present thorough discussions of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of prominent internal possessors in the relevant languages.
The volume will be of interest to researchers and students from graduate level upwards in the fields of comparative linguistics, syntax, typology, and semantics.
Contents
1: Irina Nikolaeva, András Bárány, and Oliver Bond: Introduction
2: Yogendra P. Yadava, Oliver Bond, Irina Nikolaeva, and Sandy Ritchie: The syntax of possessor prominence in Maithili
3: Oliver Bond, Felicity Meakins, and Rachel Nordlinger: Prominent possessor indexing in Gurindji
4: Sandy Ritchie: Disjoint and reflexive prominent internal possessor constructions in Chimane
5: Jean-Pierre Koenig and Karin Michelson: Extended agreement in Oneida (Iroquoian)
6: Aslı Göksel and Balkız Öztürk: Conditions on prominent internal possessors in Turkish
7: Sergey Say: Prominent internal possessors in Bashkir
8: Irina Nikolaeva and András Bárány: Proximate possessors
References
Index
