A Typological Study On Possession

The semantic concept of possession is a common conceptual cognition in human life,which has a cross-language universality.But possession as a grammatical category does not have the same expression in specific languages.There are significant differences in the expression of structures of possession relations in different languages,which is consistent with the goal of study and interpretation in the language typology study.Current researches on the possessive category adopt the framework of cognitive linguistics and the perspective of comparative linguistics to make comparison of the characteristics of attributive possessive structures between English and Chinese,including aspects of grammaticalization path,contrast and comparison of the possessive meanings,and the pragmatic feature of the possessive structure.However,the typological studies on the possessive category are relatively inadequate.Therefore,the present study mainly investigates the similarities and differences of the possessive category between English and Chinese from typological perspective,then further discusses the properties of possessive structure of world languages.The dissertation consists of eight chapters which are roughly divided into six parts.The first part is composed of Chapter 1 introduction and Chapter 2 Literature Review.The second part includes Chapter 3 and 4 which introduces the morphological types of attributive possessive structures.The third part,Chapter 5,is the word order pattern of attributive possessive structures.The fourth part,Chapter 6,is the semantic type of attributive possessive structure.The fifth part,Chapter Seven,discusses questions in relation to predicateive possessive structures.The last part,Chapter 8,concludes the study.The main conclusions of the present study are as follows:1.Characteristics of Morphological TypeThe possessive structures of both English and Chinese are mainly dependentmarking,but the genitive types of both languages are different.English is a determinergenitive language while Chinese is an adjective-genitive language.The encoding method of Chinese dialects falls into three types: the use of non-marker form,personal pronouns and conjunctions.Non-marker form is mainly applied to kinship nouns and collective nouns.The personal pronoun is divided into two types.One is that the possessor uses the plural personal pronoun to indicate the singular meaning,and the third person singular pronoun-"he" is added between the possessor and the possessum.The other is that conjunctions include the use of attributive auxiliaries,demonstratives and classifiers.Most possessive structures of Sino-Tibetan languages have structural auxiliaries to denote possessive relation,and even some languages have their own special possessive auxiliary words.Turkic Language branch of the Altaic family is characterized by the followings: Personal possession is very complicated.The forms of the singular and plural of three persons are different.The common form and respectful form is distinguished in the second person.The objectives prevail in all languages of Mongolian group,whose meaning is determined according to the context.Moreover,the Mongolian languages include personal possession and reflexive possession.The prominent feature of the Austronesian family is that the preposition and postposition of the possession are marked.There are double markers with prepositive possession and possessive markers with postpositive possession belonging to dependent marker.The basic characteristic of the South Asian language family is that all languages are basically and directly juxtaposed-structured without case auxiliary particle.Observed from the scope of the world language,the encoding of attributive possessive structure is mainly divided into two methods: simple and complex ones.The simple method includes apposition and inflection,and the complicated method includes prefixation,suffixation and the use of clitic.Possessive clitic is the most common method to express the possessive category in the world languages.Some languages are also used in other methods to express the possessive structure,such as locative,dative and comitative.The possessive clitic should be divided into prefixes and suffixes,and the suffixes are in majority,because the use of prefixes will make the information processing more difficult.If a language has the distinction between alienability and inalienability,the possessive relation of inalienability generally tends to use the form of clitic,and the possessive relation of alienability usually adds other morphemes in addition to clitic.A language that does not use affixes to express the possessive structure has possessive pronouns or possessive adjectives.The possessive classifier is also an important encoding method in the attributive possession.The possessive classifier is divided into the possessor classifier,possessive relation classifier and possessum classifier.Among them,the possessor classifier has the smallest scale and the least utilization frequency,which is determined by the characteristics of the possessor.Besides,there is usually a combination between the possessive relation classifier and the possessum classifier.There is a certain correlation between the locus of marking in possessive noun phrases and the basic word order.In both SOV word order and SVO word order,dependent-marking is dominant,and it occupies the absolute advantage in SVO word order.There is also a certain correlation between the locus of marking and language morphology.Among isolate language,inflectional language and agglutinative languages,dependent-marking accounts for more than half of them.Dependentmarking in the inflectional language is dominant,while head-marking in the polysynthetic language is dominant.2.Characteristics of Word Order PatternThe similarity of word order pattern between English and Chinese is that both of them have GN(genitive-noun)order.Besides,they are not affected by the semantic relations and possessor classification.However,English has two patterns of word order without distinction.In addition,The grammaticalization pattern of relational noun are not the same.The grammaticalization pattern of English relational nouns accords with the pattern of SVO languages.While the grammaticalization pattern of Chinese relation nouns is the same as the SOV languages.Moreover,the word order pattern of GN in Chinese is the absolute dominant order,but in the relevant collocations of word order,GN is the relative dominant order in the SOV word order,which proves that Chinese is the language with OV-VO mixed word orders.The coexistence of the two word order patterns in English may be related to the word order conversion(from OV to VO).Old English takes the OV word order,while modern English influenced by Latin language has been transformed into the VO word order.Therefore,we predict that the “s” structure will eventually be replaced by the “of” structure,and there will be only one type of genitive construction ultimately.This prediction bases on three considerations: the harmony of the possessive structure order and the VO/OV order;the harmony of possessive structure itself;the frequency of utilization.3.Characteristics of Semantic TypeAmong possessor types,the higher animacy it has,the easier it serves as a possessor.Conversely,the lower animacy it has,the easier it serves as a possessum.The typical poseeseum refers to common nouns,which indicates generic reference,the pronouns which indicates singular reference and the proper noun whose influence is explicit and requires no further definition.Observed from the perspective of crosslanguage,whether it can serve as a possessum,the cultural aspects has great influence.Based on the meaning,the possessum can be classified into three types: binary division,trichotomy,and quartering.Binary division usually equals alienablity and inalienablity;the language of trichotomy and quartering tends to distinguish the ownership and relationship separately.We have not found a language that has more than four categories of taxonomies.It seems that the less people use a language,the more detailed its taxonomy is,which indicates that they need to be clear about the ownership of each possessum.To some extent,all of these reflect the impact and restriction of economy principles on the linguistic phenomenon.The languages which distinguish between alienablity and inalienablity usually have different forms,and the form of inalienablity is more compact than that of alienablity,which has smaller internal language distance.Although both English and Chinese are not sensitive to whether the relationships are alienable or not,the omitting rules of Chinese character “?”(structural particle in Chinese)are related to alienability.The appearance of “ ? ”is selective in inalienable possessions but mandatory in alienable possessions.One special phenomena in Chinese is that the words represent body parts and general items fall into the same category which cannot appear in possessions without “?”,but kinship words,which fall into the other category,can be in an optional possession.This study holds that the particularity of words representing body parts in Chinese has something in common with certain phenomena in other languages,and the religious culture of the nation has a great influence on these language phenomena.Therefore,from the cross-linguistic perspective,it is still difficult to establish a fully feasible inalienable hierarchical sequence applying to all languages.4.“You” and “Have”The degree of grammaticalization of “have” is not the same as “you” at various stages.A perfect tense system with “have” as the auxiliary verb has been developed in English,which has abbreviations in form and a high degree of grammaticalization of markers;however,the use of the Chinese character“you” is not mandatory.It is only the perfect tense marker,therefore,its degree of grammaticalization is relatively low.The perfect tense markers of many languages in the world are grammaticalized from the possession verbs,which indicates that this phenomenon has a universal implication,with common cognitive mechanisms and motivations behind it.