Certain languages strictly distinguish giving possession from transferring ownership
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Linguistic literature demonstrates that specific languages utilize distinct grammatical verbs to explicitly distinguish temporary possession from permanent ownership.
It is cross-linguistically common to find a distinction between “temporary” vs. “permanent” states in copular verbs, e.g., Spanish estar and ser (see Deo et al. 2017). In Mashi [shr] (Bantu, JD53; Maho 2009), a similar temporary-permanent distinction holds not only of the two copular be-verbs in the language, -li (temporary state) and -ba (permanent state), but also of the two possessive have-verbs, -dwiire and -jira; -dwiire indicates temporary possession, while -jira instead indicates permanent possession. This parallelism provides a novel argument in favor of a decompositional approach to possessive verbs (Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993, Harley 1998). The analysis is further supported through patterns of allomorphy where HAVE is realized in its decomposed form, BE + comitative, in Mashi. I analyze the patterns using a Spanning Insertion analysis (Williams 2003, Svenonius 2012, 2016, Merchant 2015).
The article deals with the linguistic expression of possession and ownership in Modern Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken in Northern China. It describes the structure and semantics of Uyghur attributive and predicative possessive constructions and their interaction with the categories of inalienability, tense, aspect and mood. The paper distinguishes canonical and non-canonical possessive constructions, and shows their semantic and structural features. Special attention is paid to the structure of complex constructions with possessors and possessees as subjects of dependent clauses with the predicate in the -(i)p converb form. The relations of inalienability between the subjects of the dependent and main clauses license this use of the -(i)p converb.
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