Online workshop – 13th June 2025
Much has been written on the topic of possession in general (Heine, 1997; Nichols, 1988, among others), in the last 15 years there have also been several publications that have discussed the influence of language contact on possession-related phenomena, such as on split possession in European languages (Stolz, et al. 2008), predicative possession in Slavic (McAnallen, 2011) or attributive possession in Tunisian Arabic (Sayahi, 2015). Possession is also discussed from the cross-linguistics perspective in Aikhenvald’s 2013 paper. Drawing on the preceding research, this workshop focuses more narrowly on the genitive case and more broadly on possession in the languages of the world when influenced by language contact. This workshop loosely follows on from the Grammatical Case and Language Contact Workshop that took place in 2022 at Charles University in Prague.
We welcome general papers on the topic as well as concrete examples of languages where the marking of possession is changing, new categories are appearing, or old distinctions are vanishing. Contact between languages with head-marked possession and those with dependent-marked possession is of special interest to this workshop. We also encourage papers on lesser known/underrepresented languages.
Example research questions
What grammaticalization clines are employed in possession under the influence of contact?
Is the possession marking in transition? Does the old marking and new marking coexist in the language and how do they differ in their usage?
Is possession double-marked? How did it come to be that way?
What changes in marking of possession can be observed in minority languages under the influence of a majority language? / How do the patterns of the native tongue manifest in speakers when speaking a second language?
Is the genitive marking newly developing or vanishing, and does its semantic scope change?
The workshop is organized by the Prague Descriptive Linguistics group.
Send abstracts (300 words + bibliography) to ulman.vit@post.cz
Date: 13th June 2025
Deadline extended to 5th June 2025
Zoom link will be made available here when the schedule is published.
Bibliography
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. “Possession and ownership: A cross-linguistic perspective.” Possession and ownership: A cross-linguistic typology, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 1-64.
Carlier, Anne and Verstraete, Jean-Christophe. The Genitive, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013.
Heine, Bernd. Cognitive foundations of grammar. Oxford University Press, 1997.
McAnallen, Julia. The history of predicative possession in Slavic: Internal development vs. language contact. University of California, Berkeley, 2011.
Nichols, Johanna. “On alienable and inalienable possession”. In Honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference On Native American Linguistics, edited by William Shipley, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 1988, pp. 557-610.
Sayahi, Lotfi. “Expression of attributive possession in Tunisian Arabic: The role of language contact.” Semitic languages in contact. Brill, 2015, pp. 333-347.
Stolz, Thomas, et al. Split Possession: An areal-linguistic study of the alienability correlation and related phenomena in the languages of Europe. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008.