Possession as Non-Verbal Predication

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper argues that crosslinguistic variation in the forms of clausal possessive predication arises to a large extent from the NON-VERBAL nature of possessive predication. As evidence, I demonstrate that possessive predication across languages shows all the variation possible for non-verbal predication in general. I show the non-verbal approach not only accounts for previously observed major strategies in pos-sessive predication, for both INDEFINITE and DEFINITE possessive predication (also known respectively as HAVE and BELONG possessives), it also predicts the availability of “minor”, less-frequently observed encoding strategies.