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Adnominal Possession: Combining Typological and Second Language Perspectives

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Adnominal Possession: Combining Typological and Second Language Perspectives Adnominal possession: combining typological and second language perspectives Björn Hammarberg and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1. Introduction The notion of possession and its linguistic manifestations have been a popular topic in linguistic literature for a long time. What we will attempt here is to explore the domain of adnominal possession - pos- sessive relations and their manifestations within the noun phrase - in one particular language from two combined points of view: the ty- pological characteristics of the system, and the picture that emerges from second language learners' attempts to handle adnominal pos- session in production. We are focusing on Swedish, a language with a distinctive and rather elaborate system of adnominal possession. Our aim is twofold: to present an overview of how the Swedish sys- tem of adnominal possessive constructions works, and to show how acquisitional aspects connect with typological aspects in this domain. The English phrases Peter's hat, my son and a boy's leg all exem- plify prototypical cases of adnominal possession whereby one entity, the possessee, referred to by the head of the possessive noun phrase, is represented as possessed in one way or another by another entity, the possessor, referred to by the attribute. It has become a common- place in linguistics that possession is a difficult, if not impossible, notion to grasp (for a survey of adnominal possession in a cross- linguistic perspective cf. Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001). However, even though it seems impossible to give a reasonable general definition for all the meanings covered by possessive constructions across lan- guages and even in one language, we can still provide criteria for identifying a possessive construction, or possessive constructions in a language. Our first semantic criterion for a possessive construction Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library Authenticated Download Date | 7/10/19 11:18 AM 126 Björn Hammarberg and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm departs from the prototypical cases of adnominal possession - i.e., whether it can be used at all for referring to legal ownership (Peter's hat), or to kinship relations (my son) or to body-part relations (a boy's leg). Note that reference to just one of these relations to the ex- clusion of the other two will be fine - as is well known, a number of languages regularly employ different possessive constructions for reference to alienable possession (e.g. legal ownership) and to inal- ienable possession (e.g., kinship relations and/or body-part relations). According to our second, formal criterion, the possessor and the pos- sessee in adnominal possession together form one NP, a possessive NP, or at least belong to one NP. Adnominal possession is, thus, op- posed to at least two other related phenomena: predicative posses- sion, such as Peter has a hat or The hat belongs to Peter (for a defi- nition cf Heine 1997: 29-33), and external-possession constructions, in which a possessor "does not occur as a dependent constituent of the modified NP, but NP-externally as a constituent of the clause" (Haspelmath 1999a: 109), e.g. in Swedish Jag tittade honom i ögonen Ί looked in his eyes', lit. Ί looked him in the eyes'. Finally, we will only be interested in the most common, unmarked, 'standard' means of building possessive constructions. For English, this means that we will exclude examples like the house which is in Peter's pos- session. On the other hand, Peter 's school/dreams/wife or cat's plate, which hardly refer to possession stricto sensu, will all count as pos- sessive NPs since they have the same structure as the typically pos- sessive noun phrases such as Peter's hat/brother/leg. By combining the two criteria we can identify the possessive ad- nominal constructions in a language, which together will constitute its domain of adnominal possession. Languages differ considerably in how many and what structural types of adnominal possessive con- structions they have, and also how, according to what parameters the whole domain is stratified among these constructions. The first type of question has been particularly popular in cross-linguistic studies - Ultan (1978); Seiler (1983); Croft (1990: 28-39); Plank (1995), Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthc. a) all present structural classifications of adnominal possessive constructions. The second type of questions has also been approached cross-linguistically, particularly in the Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library Authenticated Download Date | 7/10/19 11:18 AM Adnominal possession 127 work by Seiler and linguists connected with the tradition of the Co- logne typological school (Serzisko 1984; Lehmann 1998, to mention a few). Further, there are numerous publications (too many to be listed) dealing with possessive constructions in a single language, without relating it to other languages. The connection between second language research and linguistic typology is not a new one. Early studies combining a multilingual description in a functional-typological framework with L2 error analysis made it clear that the typological properties of especially the target language can shed light on the nature of the acquisitional task, and, conversely, the L2 acquisitional aspect will highlight inherent properties of the languages involved, notably the target language (cf. e.g. Hammarberg and Viberg 1977). Studies applying the Greenber- gian notion of markedness (cf. Greenberg 1966; Croft 1990) to sec- ond language acquisition have demonstrated learners' preference for adhering to unmarked linguistic structures (cf. Eckman 1977, 1996; Hyltenstam 1984, 1986, among others). There is a wide literature on linguistic universale and second language acquisition, both in func- tionalist and formal-generative frameworks. Grammaticalisation is a further aspect which connects second lan- guage studies to typology. We should be careful here to keep apart two related, but different senses in which this term is used. It has been taken over into (first and second) language acquisition research from diachronic typology, where it is well established in the sense of a process which gradually develops grammatical elements and con- structions in a language out of lexical material. In the second lan- guage acquisition literature, grammaticalisation has mostly come to refer to the emergence and development of learners' grammars (cf. Dittmar 1992; Perdue and Klein 1992; Pfaff 1992; Giacalone Ramat 1992; Skiba and Dittmar 1992). The connections between phyloge- netic and ontogenetic domains of application and the similarities and differences in nature between diachronic-typological grammaticali- sation and acquisitional grammaticalisation can be debated (for a discussion of the two notions, cf. Giacalone Ramat 1992: 297-300). But it is clear that the two perspectives have rather different implica- tions for the understanding of what the second language learner is Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library Authenticated Download Date | 7/10/19 11:18 AM 128 Björn Hammarberg and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm acquiring. In the present study we will refer to grammaticalisation in the diachronic-typological sense, unless we state otherwise. In the following, we will first outline the system of adnominal possessive constructions in Swedish in section 2, then in section 3 analyse the main problems with adnominal possession encountered in L2 Swedish production, and finally in section 4 discuss the com- bined picture that emerges from these two approaches. 2. Adnominal possessive constructions in Swedish 2.1. General In Modern Swedish, adnominal possession, as defined in section 1, is mainly expressed by three constructions: • the "standard possessive noun phrase", in which the possessor precedes the possessee; • noun-noun compounds, in which the first part modifies the sec- ond one; and • constructions in which the head nominal is modified by a post- posed prepositional phrase. According to the semantic criterion, all these constructions are pos- sessive: thus, both "standard possessive noun phrases" and noun- noun compounds can refer to both legal ownership, kinship relations and body-part relations, whereas constructions with postposed prepo- sitional phrases can refer to kinship relations and to body-part- relations (although not to legal ownership). According to the formal criterion, the three constructions represent adnominal possession, since the possessor and the possessee belong to one and the same NP. In the following subsections we will go through the main proper- ties of these three construction types and the factors behind the choice among them. In the last subsection, we will present the typo- logical profile of Swedish adnominal possession. Brought to you by | Stockholm University Library Authenticated Download Date | 7/10/19 11:18 AM A dnom inal possession 129 2.2. Standard possessive noun phrases In the "standard possessive noun phrase", abbreviated as PNP in the rest of this paper, the possessor adnominal precedes the possessee. The possessor is • either a special possessive pronoun (for the first and second per- sons and reflexives) agreeing with the possessee in gender and number, cf. min bil 'my:COM car' vs. mitt bord 'my:N table' vs. mina bilar 'my:PL cars', • or marked with the element -s (these are normally referred to as "genitives"), cf. Peters bil/Peters bilar 'Peter's car/Peter's cars', hans bil/hans bilar 'his car/his cars'. Morphosyntactically, the Swedish (and, generally, Standard Conti- nental Scandinavian) possessive -s behaves similarly to its English counterpart -'s. Thus, it always appears at the very end of a noun, after all suffixes, cf. en pojke-s 'a boy-GEN', pojke-n-s 'boy- DEF.COM-GEN', pojk-ar-s 'boy-PL-GEN', pojk-ar-na-s 'boy-PL- DEF.PL-GEN'. It also shows the tendency to attach to the final word of a NP resulting in what is traditionally called "group genitives", as in mannen pä gatans äsikter - lit.'the man in the street's opinions' (i.e., an ordinary person's opinion). Its form is even more consistent than the form of -'s in English in that is is always pronounced in one and the same way.
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