Structures of adnominal possession in Austria’s traditional dialects: Variation and change

Abstract

By means of the first comprehensive apparent-time study of Austria’s traditional dialects, this paper explores the use of adnominal syntactic constructions of expressing the semantic relation of possession. The article focuses on both the geographical variation and the interplay of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The analyses are based on data from direct recordings of 162 speakers from forty villages and on written questionnaire data from 103 of these speakers from thirty-seven villages. The analyses reveal clear geographical patterns for those constructions in which the possessor phrase precedes the possessum phrase within the entire construction. We propose to focus on the discursive-pragmatic properties of the possessor phrase to explain the fact that each of the observed dialects allows the possessor to precede the possessum. We provide evidence that referential anchoring, combined with the concept of accessibility, is the key to explaining the syntactic order within the used constructions.