This paper argues that there is a fundamental difference between alienable and inalienable possession in the syntax of the noun phrase, and that this difference involves direction of predication. A possessum is the subject of a predicate that is or contains the possessor; the configurational relationship between the possessive predicate and its subject is established by a relator that takes the possessum either as its specifier or as its complement, with the possessive predicate occupying the other position in the small clause. Alienably possessed noun phrases involve an underlying syntax in which the possessum is the relator’s specifier; inalienable possession constructions are built on a structure in which the possessum is the complement of the relator. The paper provides an analytical sketch of a partial typology of possessed noun phrases and an account of the cross-linguistic generalisation that for languages that show a systematic structural distinction between alienable and inalienable adnominal possession, it is the inalienably possessed noun phrase that is morphosyntactically simpler than the alienably possessed one. The focus of the discussion is on Hungarian, a language whose ‘possessedness marker’ -(j)a/-(j)e is teased apart into two component parts: an affixal ‘spurious’ article -a/e lexicalising the relator of DP-internal possession, and an additional -j- that in noun phrases that show a morphological alienability split has morphemic status, functioning as the linker that facilitates the Predicate Inversion derivation of alienably possessed noun phrases.
Dikken, Marcel den. 2006. Relators and linkers: The syntax of predication, predicate inversion, and copulas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dikken, Marcel den. 2011. On the strategies for forming long A′–dependencies: Evidence from Hungarian. In Balázs Surányi (ed.), [title tbd] (volume of papers from the conference on Minimalist Approaches to Syntactic Locality). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (to appear).
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Nichols, Johanna. 1988. On alienable and inalienable possession. In W. Shipley (ed.), In honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference on Native American Linguistics, 557–609. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Schirm, Anita. 2009. Alienable and inalienable possession in Hungarian. Paper presented at
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Szabolcsi, Anna. 1983. The possessor that ran away from home. The Linguistic Review 3. 89–102.
Szabolcsi, Anna. 1994. The noun phrase. In Ferenc Kiefer & Katalin É. Kiss (eds.), The syntactic structure of Hungarian. Syntax and Semantics 27, 179–274. San Diego: Academic Press.
Szabolcsi, Anna & Tibor Laczkó. 1992. A főnévi csoport szerkezete. In Ferenc Kiefer (ed.), Strukturális magyar nyelvtan I. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. 179–298.
Cited by (8)
Cited by eight other publications
Monich, Irina
2023. Morphological analysis of alienability contrast in Nuer: an atypical typical case. The Linguistic Review 40:2 ► pp. 217 ff.
Dékány, Éva
2021. Possessive DPs. In The Hungarian Nominal Functional Sequence [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 100], ► pp. 159 ff.
Dékány, Éva
2021. The Functional Sequence Above QP. In The Hungarian Nominal Functional Sequence [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 100], ► pp. 93 ff.
den Dikken, Marcel
2018. An Integrated Perspective on Hungarian Nominal and Verbal Inflection. In Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 94], ► pp. 147 ff.
2015. Az elidegeníthető birtoklást kifejező -j- képző esete a -(Vt)t főnévképzővel és más főnévképzőkkel. Jelentés és Nyelvhasználat 2:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
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