Possession and attributive modification: a conceptual and typological investigation
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Essex
Department Name: Language and Linguistics
Abstract
All languages have ways to modify nouns (e.g. adjectives) and to express possession (e.g. by the preposition of), but many languages lack these grammatical devices and use a variety of other means, often blurring the distinction between the two categories. Although linguists have studied adjectival constructions and possessive constructions there has been very little research on the (very tricky) question of how adjectival and possessive constructions relate to each other. We will survey previous research on the ways nouns can be modified across languages and we will provide a preliminary conceptual analysis of the problem.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Andrew Spencer (Principal Investigator) |
| Description | In English we can express the notion 'food belonging to a/the cat' in several ways: 'the/a cat's food', 'the food of the/a cat' or 'cat food'. In some languages it's possible or even necessary to turn 'cat' into an adjective to achieve this, along the lines of 'feline food'. We looked at a whole range of languages to see what strategies they use for expressing possession and how those strategies relate to other constructions, such as ordinary adjective+noun combinations ('good food'). We found that if a language can use, say, the adjective strategy for possession and also the "apostrophe 's" strategy then it can also use the compounding strategy (catfood). A number of other relationships between other types of possession construction were also uncovered. |
| Exploitation Route | We have already been developing our ideas ourselves in a variety of conference presentations and drafts. We are currently writing a book which summarizes some of these findings. Two papers are available which bear directly on this grant, available from the PI's academia.edu site: 'The Possession-Modification Scale' and 'Possession and Modification' (both with I. Nikolaeva) |
| Sectors | Education Other |
| URL | https://essex.academia.edu/AndrewSpencer |
| Description | To further our theoretical research into the possessive-modification constructions and into attributive modification generally |
| First Year Of Impact | 2007 |
| Sector | Other |
| Impact Types | Cultural |