A Parallel Analysis of have-Type Copular Constructions in two have-Less Indo-European Languages

This paper presents data from two Indo-European languages, Irish and Hindi/Urdu, which do not use verbs for expressing possession (i.e., they do not have a verb comparable to the English verb have). Both of the languages use copula constructions. Hindi/Urdu combines the copula with either a genitive case marker or a postposition on the possessor noun phrase to construct possession. Irish achieves the same effect by combining one of two copula elements with a prepositional phrase. I argue that both languages differentiate between temporary and permanent instances, or stage-level and individual-level predication, of possession. The syntactic means for doing so do not overlap between the two: while Hindi/Urdu employs two distinct markers to differentiate between stage-level and individual-level predication, Irish uses two different copulas. A single parallel LFG analysis for both languages is presented based on the PREDLINK analysis. It is shown how the analysis is capable of serving as input to the semantics, which is modeled using Glue Semantics and which differentiates between stage-level and individual-level predication by means of a situation argument.

In particular, it is shown that the inalienable/alienable distinction previously applied to the Hindi/Urdu data is insufficient. The reanalysis presented here in terms of the stage-level vs. individual-level distinction can account for the data from Hindi/Urdu in a more complete way.