Revisiting Possessors in DPs: A New Perspective

The paper offers a new LFG analysis of possessive DPs in Hungarian. This account is designed to overcome two difficulties that the majority of previous generative approaches had to face: a) the problem of the (a)symmetrical cohead relationship between the noun head and the possessedness marker b) the problem of dual theta role assignment in GB (or its LFG equivalent) when the noun head is relational and the possessedness marker is also considered an argument taking predicate. The new account postulates that a lexical predication template converts an ordinary, nonrelational noun into a "raising" type predicate with an (XCOMP) propositional argument and a nonthematic (POSS) function. The possessedness marker is the predicate of the (XCOMP), and its open (POSS) argument is functionally controlled by the (POSS) of the raising predicate. The same lexical predication template is assumed to apply to relational nouns except that, as a result, they become "equi" predicates, that is, the (POSS) function introduced by the template is assigned to one of their arguments. This approach solves the above-mentioned problems, and it has several additional advantages.