Open AccessTwo cases of prominent internal possessor constructions
Author(s) -
Sandy Ritchie
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2016.32
Subject(s) - possessive , linguistics , computer science , sentence , object (grammar) , philosophy
This paper outlines a new analysis ofthe syntactic structure and discourse function of a ‘prominentinternal possessor construction’ (PIPC) in Chimane (unclassified,Bolivia) and compares it with an existing analysis of a different kindof PIPC found in Maithili (Indo- Aryan, India/Nepal). PIPCs in Chimaneand Maithili involve an apparently non-local agreement relationbetween verbs and possessors which are internal to possessive NPs. InChimane, it is argued that internal possessors are able to controlobject agreement via a clause-level ‘proxy’ of the internal possessor– see also Ritchie (under review). The paper goes on to compare thisconstruction with PIPCs in Maithili, and shows that speakers use PIPCsin discourse to indicate the information structure role of theinternal possessor. In the case of Chimane, it seems that internalpossessors which bear the secondary topic role are more likely tocontrol object agreement, while in Maithili, other semantic andinformation structural features of internal possessors are atplay. The contributions of the various levels of sentence structureare modelled using the LFG architecture developed in Dalrymple &Nikolaeva (2005; 2011).