Tags · Domain
Possession
A relation between a possessor and a possessed thing, covering ownership, kinship and body parts.
Topics with this tag
How do languages say “there is”?
“The water is in the river” takes the water as given and tells you where it is. “There is water in the river” reverses that: the river is the setting and the water is the news. Saying that something exists therefore reuses the machinery for saying where it is, and languages differ in how much they change along the way — some leave the locational predicate untouched, some add a placeholder subject, some borrow the possessive verb, and some keep a predicate for existence alone. The choice often splits by animacy and by number.
How do languages say “I have X”?
Some languages use a transitive HAVE verb; others say “at me, X is”, “to me, X is”, or “I-with X”. The same language often switches strategy with what is possessed — inanimate, animate, kin, body-parts.
Do “my hand” and “my house” use the same grammar?
Hands and mothers come with a possessor built in; houses and books change hands. Grammars pick this up: some force a possessive onto body-part and kin nouns or give them special possessed forms, some route acquired things through a classifier, Mandarin lets its linker drop exactly with kin, and much of Europe moves the body-part possessor onto the verb as a dative.
Where does “the man’s head” carry its mark?
Two nouns get tied together in five ways: a genitive on the possessor (Latin, Russian, English ’s), a person affix on the possessed noun (Hungarian, Ainu, Navajo), both at once (Turkish, Quechua), a free particle between the two (Japanese の, Mandarin 的, Romance de), or nothing beyond word order (Welsh, Indonesian).
How do languages say “I don’t have X”?
To express absence of possession, languages either negate a HAVE-verb, add a negative determiner to the object, or reframe the situation as one of non-existence or absence — with the possessor as topic, location, or dative.