Prominent Internal Possessors

Prominent Internal Possessors
by: András Bárány (Editor),Oliver Bond (Editor),Irina Nikolaeva (Editor)&0more
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Edition: Illustrated
Publication Date: 2019/5/28
Language: English
Print Length: 304 pages
ISBN-10: 0198812140
ISBN-13: 9780198812142
Book Description
This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive cross-linguistic overview of an understudied typological phenomenon, the clause-level argument-like behavior 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 focused 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.
About the Author
This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive cross-linguistic overview of an understudied typological phenomenon, the clause-level argument-like behavior 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 focused 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. Read more