Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

This paper investigates predicative possession in Amharic (Ethiosemitic, Afroasiatic). It focuses on the formal and functional characteristics of possessive predications following Heineʼs (1997) and Stassenʼs (2009) typological models. Informant consultation, online searches and introspection were the major data sources. While the existential verb allə ‘there is/exists’ is the regular possessive predicator which inflects with subject and object suffixes, two action verbs jaz- ‘to hold’ and akabbət- ‘to accumulate’ also convey possession in their grammaticalized senses. Besides peculiarities regarding verb form and word order, the possessive constructions are multi-functional and correlate the lexical natures and/or syntactic roles of the arguments. The possessive predication involving a copula with the possessum (POSM) as subject and the possessor (POSR) as complement is often used referring to ownership (true possession) unlike the verb allə which is more polysemous. In almost all forms of possessive predications except the copular ones, the POSM nouns remain indefinite. Interestingly, the locational structure involving the POSR as locative adjunct needs an indefinite POSM as subject for its possessive sense as in məs’ɨhaf lɨʤu ɡa allə ‘The boy has books’/Lit.: ‘A book is with the boy’. With the definite subject, the clause conveys a mere location (cf. məs’ɨhafu lɨʤu ɡa allə ‘The book is with the boy’). The existential and locational forms of possessive predications convey varieties of more specific senses within their possessive semantic category. The meaning variation depends on the linear order of arguments, predicate types, and the context.

References
Stassen, L. (2009). Predicative possession. Oxfordː Oxford University Press.
Heine, B. (1997). Possession: Cognitive Sources, Forces, and Grammaticalization. Cambridgː Cambridge University Press.