Possessive constructions : a cross-linguistic analysis

Abstract AR

Thi s article expl ores syntactic properties underl ying possessive constructions includ ing confi gurat ional , thematic , Case and agreement relat ions and related arguments such as those concerning the status of the English apostrophe ('s) and the preposition (of) and their count erp art s in other languages.

It provides a summarized exposition of possessive constructions in both English and Arabic.

Some examples from other languag es such as Berber, Hebrew.

French etc.

are also dealt with as the analysis is intend ed to be cro ss-lin gui stic .

It is argued, following Vergnaud and Zubizarreta (1992) that a head noun takes (optionally) one argument "possessor" as a complement to which it ass igns a theta-role at OS.

In prepo siti onal possessive constructions, a head noun is taken to subcategorize for a PP without actuall y assigning directly a theta-role to the possessor DP.

The theory of semantica lly empt y clements has suspended with.

The analysis reveals that variou s structural diversit ies among languages in possessive constructions seem to be due to properties of AGR element whose function is to identify grammatical relation s between 0 , N and DP/PP in possessive constructions.

The conclusion has been put in context with two leadin g ideas: Atkin son' s Funct ional Parameteri zation Hypothe sis (Atkinson, 1992) and Radford' s Prefunctional Stage (Radford, 1990).