La grammaire de la possession (review)

This interesting and linguistically disparate collection contains eight essays (one in English, the rest in French). It presents a range of research and opinion about the nature of possession (both through grammatical relationships and the semantic reality of having something), largely speaking from a principles and parameters framework.

It begins with an admirably clear essay by the editors which discusses the nature of possession within this framework. Jean-François Bourdin’s essay, ‘L’expression de la possession en tchèque. Aspects morphosyntaxiques’, forms part of the ongoing discussion of the manner in which definiteness is expressed in a language with no discrete marker for the category. Bourdin comes to the conclusion that the expression of the possessive in Czech is not so much related to the idea of a determiner, but rather is very strongly adjectival.

Jae-Yeon Jun and Ok-Kyung Kang present an essay dealing with ‘Le syntagme nominal possessif en anglais et coréen: Remarques comparatives’. It discusses the many dissimilarities and occasional similarities found in the expression of possession in the two languages. One of their most striking findings is that the anaphoric possessor in Korean can actually be seen more as a ‘pseudo-pronoun’ with many more characteristics in common with a noun than would be normal for a pronoun in other languages.

Using evidence from the Semitic languages, Alain Kihm’s essay, ‘A propos de 1’état construit’, enters the long-standing debate over the manner in which we should interpret apparently prepositional phrase means of expressing possession. Quite sensibly, Kihm does not provide a final answer to the problem although his material does advance our understanding. Marie-Laurence Knittel’s essay, ‘La structure morphosyntaxique des syntagmes nominaux possessivisés du hongrois’, is a particularly impressive example of the possibilities available in the application of such a model, demonstrating that our concept of ‘possession’ must be extended (with this language at least) to include the infinitives of verbs and postpositions, among others.

In ‘Les syntagmes nominaux possessifs en français moderne: Syntaxe et morphologie’, Anne Zribi-Hertz describes, among other things, a syntactic idiosyncrasy of French (and the other Romance languages): The personal element of the expressions called possessive is not an argument in itself but rather represents merely the traces of person.

Jacqueline Guéron discusses ‘Le verbe avoir et la possession’. Using material largely derived from English and French, she puts forward the proposition that it is not so much that there is a possessive nature to the use of have in the expression of perfective aspect, but rather there is a perfective element in the use of have to express possession, in the sense (among others) that possession is by its nature a completed act. It would have been interesting if she had extended her findings both to languages, like Gaelic, which have no overt equivalent to have, and those, like the Scandinavian languages, which have two equivalents (Norwegian ha and få). Elements of this topic are continued by Heidi Harley in her essay ‘You’re having me on! Aspects of have’. Concentrating solely on English, she comes to the conclusion that how we interpret the predicate have is based upon two consequences: the type of complement have takes, and whether there is a binding relationship between its subject and a pronominal element in its complement.

Overall this is a most refreshing collection of new work throwing theoretical and practical light on a wide range of themes and languages. A very minor criticism might be that the connection between grammatical expressions of possession and lexical expressions of ownership might have been made more obvious; this does not in any way invalidate the authors’ conclusions, however.