Differential Argument Marking with the Latvian debitive

2016

The Independent Partitive as an Eastern Circum-Baltic isogloss

2015

The paper claims that the independent partitive case in Finnic languages and the independent partitive genitive case in Baltic and East Slavic (henceforth: ip(g)) show considerable correlations that cannot be accounted for but by language contact. Given that both the ip(g) in Baltic and East Slavic as well as the ip(g) in Finnic are inherited from the respective proto-languages, the paper also offers a methodological discussion of how inherited categories may also be shown to be subject to language contact. A typologically not infrequent category must be individualized on the basis of a list of properties. Thus, 13 semantic and 5 morphosyntactic properties have been discussed. While the stu…

External possession and constructions that may have it

2016

AbstractThere seems to be no construction that would code specifically the possession relation of external possessors. Instead, various host constructions such as the free-affectee construction (a subtype of which is the free-dative construction), monotransitive or applicative construction can – to a different degree – accommodate participants that are bound by a possession relation. The binding procedure identifying the possessor operates at the pragmatic-semantic interface and takes into account the semantic roles of the event participants, their discourse saliency and lexical properties (such as animacy), world knowledge, properties of the possessum (such as the degree of (in)alienabilit…