On the interpretation of alienable vs. inalienable possession
A psycholinguistic investigation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12197184 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Frantisek Lichtenberk (University of Auckland, corresponding author), Jyotsna Vaid (0000-0001-5340-4074, Texas A&M University), Hsin-Chin Chen (National Chung Cheng University), Hsin‐Chin Chen (0000-0003-1685-1427, National Chung Cheng University) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 659-689 |
| Publication date | 2011-10-11 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cognitive Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0936-5907 • E-ISSN: 1613-3641 |
| Publisher | De Gruyter Mouton (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/cogl.2011.025 |
| OpenAlex | W1991323592 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 10 |
Oceanic languages typically make a grammatical contrast between expressions of alienable and inalienable possession. Moreover, further distinctions are made in the alienable category but not in the inalienable category. The present research tests the hypothesis that there is a good motivation for such a development in the former case. As English does not have a grammaticalized distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, it provides a good testing ground. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants were asked to write down the first interpretation that came to mind for possessive phrases, some of which contained inherently relational possessums, while others contained possessums that are not inherently relational. Phrases with non-relational possessums elicited a broader range of interpretations and a lower consistency of a given interpretation across possessor modifiers than those with relational possessums. Study 2 demonstrated that users assign a default interpretation to a possessive phrase containing a relational possessum even when another reading is plausible. Study 3, a corpus-based analysis of possessive phrase use, showed that phrases with relational possessums have a narrower range of interpretations than those with other possessums. Taken together, the findings strongly suggest that grammatical distinctions between different types of alienable possession are motivated
Alienation · Consistency (knowledge bases · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Phrase · Possession (linguistics · Possessive · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence
Aquisição de estruturas possessivas inalienáveis
Syntactic and lexical -ase- are distinct suffixes
Culture is a shadow”, language as a shade; Fragments of a dead language, Naka’ela
I broke a finger”
Possessive pronouns in Welsh
Categorizing possession in Zuanga-Yuanga and other Kanak languages (New Caledonia)
The pragmatics of possession
| Citations per year | 0.64 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2024 (10) |
| Highly cited | No |