{"id":1700,"date":"2011-08-24T10:00:31","date_gmt":"2011-08-24T08:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1700"},"modified":"2011-08-19T09:00:17","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T07:00:17","slug":"the-expression-of-possession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1700","title":{"rendered":"The expression of possession"},"content":{"rendered":"
The expression of possession.<\/strong> Ed. by William B. McGregor<\/strong>. (The expression of cognitive categories 2.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2010. Pp. 435. ISBN 9783110184389<\/a>. $29.95.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos<\/a><\/strong>, United Arab Emirates University<\/em><\/p>\n

This book is a collection of nine articles focusing on how possession is expressed in different languages. William McGregor\u2019s introduction discusses basic issues related to possession, such as the nature of possessum and possessor entities and of the possessive relation, including attributive\/adnominal, predicative, and external possession.<\/p>\n

The first article in the collection, by Peter<\/strong> Willemse<\/strong>, Kristin<\/strong> Davidse<\/strong>, and Liesbet<\/strong> Heyvaert<\/strong>, probes the information status of the possessum in English adnominal possessive constructions, showing that its treatment as a definite noun phrase does not adequately capture its properties. It introduces a taxonomy of givenness, showing that possessum referents can have a status at any point in this hierarchy. Jan<\/strong> Rijkhoff<\/strong> discusses co-variation between form and function of adnominal possessive modifiers in Dutch and English and concludes that the term \u2018attributive possession\u2019 is too general to capture the distribution of possessives. In Doris<\/strong> Payne<\/strong>\u2019s contribution, the semantic\/thematic relation between predicate possession and location is examined in a critical fashion on the basis of data from Maa to show that possession cannot be just a metaphorical extension of location.<\/p>\n

Sonja Eisenbei\u03b2<\/strong>, Ayumi Matsuo<\/strong>, and Ingrid Sonnenstuhl<\/strong> provide a crosslinguistic overview of child language acquisition studies of possessive structures, and show that children follow a step-by-step process in the emergence and range of functions acquired of possessive structures. Mirjam<\/strong> Fried<\/strong> introduces a constructional account of plain vs. situational possession in Czech, and shows that the possibility of something becoming a possessum lies in cultural concepts and expectations of what can be possessed rather than animacy or concreteness.<\/p>\n

Frantisek<\/strong> Lichtenberk<\/strong> turns the discussion to possessive constructions in Oceanic languages. Most Oceanic languages have two distinct types of attributive possession, in which the possessive affix attaches directly to the possessum (which overwhelmingly signals inalienable possession) or to a possessive classifier (which expresses some types of inalienable possession). Miriam<\/strong> van<\/strong> Staden<\/strong> discusses possessive clauses in East Nusantara, a linguistic area of East Indonesia and Timor. One of the languages, Tidore, exhibits a split, argument-referencing system in which verbal arguments are marked on the predicate differently than possessive arguments, which blurs the distinction between attributive and predicative possession.<\/p>\n

In Hein<\/strong> va<\/strong>n der<\/strong> Voort<\/strong>\u2019s account of possessive expressions in Southwestern Amazon, two main adnominal possessive strategies are described, in which a possessive element attaches to either the possessor or the possessum. Finally, Kearsy<\/strong> Cormier<\/strong> and Jordan<\/strong> Fenlon<\/strong> discuss possession in British Sign Language, showing that it exhibits many of the patterns found in spoken languages (e.g. attributive versus predicative possession, the expression of inalienable possession), but differs significantly in its inherent use of \u2018space\u2019\u00a0 in the expression of possession.<\/p>\n

This collection of articles is essential reading for researchers, academics, and advanced linguistics students interested in the expression of possession crosslinguistically and the relation between the linguistic forms of different possessive structures and their semantic or grammatical functions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The expression of possession. Ed. by William B. McGregor. (The expression of cognitive categories 2.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2010. Pp. 435. ISBN 9783110184389. $29.95. Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University This book is a collection of nine articles focusing on how possession is expressed in different languages. William McGregor\u2019s introduction discusses basic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1700"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1701,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions\/1701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}