Prominent Internal Possessors

This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive cross-linguistic overview of an understudied typological phenomenon, the clause-level argument-like behavior of internal possessors. In some languages, adnominal possessors - or a subset thereof - figure more prominently than expected in the phrase-external syntax, by controlling predicate agreement and/or acting as a switch-reference pivot in same-subject relations. There is no independent evidence that such possessors are external to the possessive phrase or that they assume head status within it. This creates a puzzle for virtually all syntactic theories, as it is generally believed that agreement and switch-reference target phrasal heads rather than dependents.

Following an introduction to the typology of the phenomenon and an overview of possible syntactic analyses, chapters in the volume offer more focused case studies from a wide range of languages spoken in the Americas, Eurasia, South Asia, and Australia. The contributions are largely based on novel data collected by the authors and present thorough discussions of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of prominent internal possessors in the relevant languages.

The volume will be of interest to researchers and students from graduate level upwards in the fields of comparative linguistics, syntax, typology, and semantics.

András Bárány is a Post-doctoral Researcher at SOAS, University of London. His PhD from the University of Cambridge explored the relationship between case and agreement in Hungarian and from a comparative perspective. His research interests include morphosyntactic phenomena across languages, such as possession, switch-reference, and differential argument marking, as well as Uralic and Turkic languages. He is the author of the OUP volume Person, Case, and Agreement: The Morphosyntax of Inverse Agreement and Global Case Splits (2017).

Oliver Bond is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey. His research interests include theoretical morphosyntax, typology, and language documentation and description. His work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Linguistics and Linguistic Typology, and he is the co-editor, with Greville G. Corbett, Marina Chumakina, and Dunstan Brown, of Archi: Complexities of Agreement in Cross-Theoretical Perspective (OUP, 2016).

Irina Nikolaeva is a Professor of Linguistics at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests are linguistic typology, syntax, morphology, information structure, and non-transformational theories of grammar, as well as the documentation and description of endangered Uralic, Altaic, and Palaeosiberian languages. Her recent books include Objects and Information Structure (with Mary Dalrymple; CUP, 2011) and A Grammar of Tundra Nenets (de Gruyter, 2014).