Predicative possession - Stassen, Leon (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Includes bibliographical references (pages 769-801) and indexes
Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Part I. The Typology of Predicative Possession; Part II. Determinant Factors; Part III. A Model of Predicative Possession Encoding; Appendix A: Alphabetical listing of the sample; Appendix B: Typological stratification of the sample; References; Index of Languages; Index of Subjects
This is the first comprehensive treatment of the strategies employed in the world's languages to express predicative possession, as in "the boy has a bat". It presents the results of the author's fifteen-year research project on the subject. Predicative possession is the source of many grammaticalization paths - as in the English perfect tense formed from to have - and its typology is an important key to understanding the structural variety of the world's languages and how theychange. Drawing on data from some 400 languages representing all the world's language families, most of whic