Expressing possession with HAVE and BE: affected possession structures in Flemish

This paper concerns a cartographic account of Flemish Event Possessives (FEVPs) which alternate between a variety with HAVE and one with BE. The FEVP matrix subjects have the interpretation of both being the Possessor (in its broadest meaning) of the event expressed in the embedded clause and being affected by it, the latter shown by among others the ‘ban on dead arguments’ diagnostic (Hole 2006, 387-388). Cross-linguistically the alternation between possessive HAVE and BE appears with a nominative subject in the HAVE-variety, but a dative subject in the BE-variety. In line with the analysis o... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Buelens, Liisa
Dokumenttyp: bookChapter
Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
Verlag/Hrsg.: Cambridge Scholar Publishing House
Schlagwörter: Languages and Literatures / Flemish External Possession / Flemish Event Possessives / nominative-dative alternation / affected possession / Flemish cartographic syntax
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27482148
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/6884189

This paper concerns a cartographic account of Flemish Event Possessives (FEVPs) which alternate between a variety with HAVE and one with BE. The FEVP matrix subjects have the interpretation of both being the Possessor (in its broadest meaning) of the event expressed in the embedded clause and being affected by it, the latter shown by among others the ‘ban on dead arguments’ diagnostic (Hole 2006, 387-388). Cross-linguistically the alternation between possessive HAVE and BE appears with a nominative subject in the HAVE-variety, but a dative subject in the BE-variety. In line with the analysis of HAVE as the spell-out of BE with a preposition or a case (cf. Benveniste 1966; Freeze 1992; Kayne 1993; Hoekstra 1994, 1995; Belvin and den Dikken 1997; den Dikken 1997), Broekhuis and Cornips (1994) argue that HAVE and BE respectively assign accusative and dative case to their complements in Heerlen Dutch possessives. As expected, the matrix subject in the Flemish HAVE-FEVP is nominative. The availability of a pronominal direct object het (‘it’) in HAVE-FEVPs, but not in BE-FEVPs, follows from the above mentioned traditional analyses of possessive HAVE and BE as well. What is unexpected, however, is that the matrix subject of the Flemish BE-FEVP does not surface with dative case but instead with nominative. I argue that the nominative matrix subject of the FEVP in both its varieties occupies a similar (applicative) relation to the clausal domain as that observed for the Possessor of the subject-related Flemish External Possessor pattern (FEP) (Haegeman 2011; Haegeman and van Koppen 2012; Haegeman and Danckaert 2013; Buelens and D’Hulster 2014). For the subject-related FEP-pattern, Haegeman and Danckaert (2013) argue that the Possessor occupies a position higher in the clause than its unmarked DP-internal position (cf. Landau 1999; Payne and Barshi 1999; Hole 2004, 2006; Lee-Schoenfeld 2006; Deal 2010, 2013, forthc.). Along those lines, I argue that in the FEVP an Affectee feature [+AFF] on an applicative light verb ...