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La grammaire de la possession
ELSEVIER
Lingua
110(2000)937-947
Book review Jacqueline GuCron and Anne Zribi-Hertz (eds.), La granzn-rail-r de la possr.ssio~~. Nanterre: Universite Paris X. 1998. (226 pp.). ISBN 2 9509367 I 7. FF. 100.00. Reviewed by Marcel den Dikken, Linguistics Program, CUNY Graduate Center. 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309, USA. The grammar of possession is a rich and rewarding research domain, sure to give rise to discussions of a wide variety of different languages (since the expression of possession varies greatly from one language to the next) and to results bearing on the structure of sentences and noun phrases and the structural representation of argument and event structure. In 1997 I edited a special issue of Ling:uu on the syntax of possession and the verb ‘have’. More recently, Jacqueline Gueron and Anne ZribiHertz, who have individually contributed important work in this domain. have brought together a number of studies on the syntax of possession in their book Lo granzmaire de lu possession, published by the University of Paris X. As the blurb text discloses, the studies contained herein are the outcome of a collective reflection on the grammar of possession organised by the ‘Jeune Equipe’ of this university and CNRWaris-8. The book features seven separate studies plus a general introduction (written by the editors) to the theoretical framework of which the studies avail themselves. Of the eight papers, seven are written in French: only Heidi Harley’s contribution (the last one in the book; the two papers specifically devoted to the verb ha\,c have been lifted out of a sequence which is otherwise ordered alphabetically by author, and appear at the end) is in English, although it gets a French title in the table of contents and as the running header. The overall result is a somewhat diverse collection of papers on the general theme of the grammar of possession, some largely descriptive in nature. some highly theoretical, and some sailing a course in between the two extremes. I read the book linearly, from cover to cover, passing through two data oriented discussions of possessed noun phrases (one on Czech, the other on Korean) on my way to a theoretically novel approach to the construct state, then returning to a data-centred study on Hungarian possessed nominals (with very interesting discussion of the theoretical repercussions of the facts), subsequently being treated on an analysis of French possessives of the type son 1ilv.e ‘his/her book’ and le sien ‘[the] his/hers’. a heavy-duty theoretical story about possessive and perfective /Tulle and, finally. a 037%2166/00/$ PII:
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Science B.V.
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paper which addresses possession only from the margin, being primarily concerned with the causative and experiencer uses of have in English. It is curious that it is precisely this last paper which, although it ventures well outside the realm defined by the title of the book, tries explicitly to link itself to other papers contained in the volume. The connections between the studies are generally loose, and the editors’ introduction - or, for that matter, the picture of the Tower of Babel on the front cover does little to enhance the idea that the various authors are speaking with one voice. In what follows I will attempt to tie the papers together somewhat more closely, though on the whole I will largely confine myself to a brief discussion of the highlights of each of the contributions to the volume. Jean-Francois Bourdin discusses morphosyntactic aspects of the expression of possession in Czech noun phrases, focusing in particular on the well-known Slavic trait of ‘possessive adjectives’. His brief study serves as a good overview of the basic facts that any analysis will need to come to terms with, but although Lida Veselovska’s (1995) detailed account of Czech noun-phrase structure, embedded in the DP hypothesis, is cast aside as a representative of “un cadre minimaliste ou la proliferation des categories fonctionelles n’a pas encore rencontre Guillaume d’Ockham” (fn. 4, p. 27) Bourdin does not himself contribute much in the way of an analysis of the Czech data. Along the way, Bourdin briefly addresses the question of whether things like the books are John’s in Czech should receive a predicative AP analysis or one in terms of an elliptical noun phrase featuring an attributive AP - and hc shows that, although gapping might constitute an argument in favour of the ellipsis approach, there are also examples (such as the Czech counterpart of nothing here is John’s) for which one would be hard-pressed defending an analysis along ellipsis lines. In their recent work on predicate possessives, Borschev and Partee (1999) come to essentially the same conclusion, with reference to Russian and English data. But in Korean, as Jae-Yeon Jun and Ok-Kyung Kang point out in their joint contribution, predicate possessives corresponding to English this book is John’s are not structurally ambiguous: they appear to support an ellipsis analysis (‘the one of John’) only. In this respect, they are a lot like their French (celui de Jean) or Dutch (die van Jan ‘that of John’) counterparts - also with respect to the marker they use on the possessor: the -iy of Korean behaves a lot like French de, Dutch van, or English qf, for that matter. What is especially interesting is that the distribution of the ‘possessive marker’ -iy seems to be correlated with Predicate Inversion inside the nominal phrase. Thus, Jun and Kang point to Korean examples which seem to parallel to a significant degree Spanish constructions of the type guupo de cara ‘pretty of face, pretty-faced’, discussed by Espafiol-Echevarria (1997) in the Lingua issue that I referred to above. An example of this sort provided by Jun and Kang is cu~r~ny&4 nai ‘middle-Pass age, i.e., middle-aged’ - something which has a close counterpart in the nominalised adjectival construction by which the Dutch refer to ‘the aged’: o&en vulz dugen ‘old+L of days, (the ones who are) old of age’. Jun and Kang refer to cases of the type just discussed as involving ‘predicats inverses’ (inverted predicates), and I believe them wholeheartedly, also where they propose a Predicate Inversion approach to quantificational noun phrases featuring -?y such as se k&y sakwu ‘three CLASS-POSS apple, i.e., three apples’ - the numeral-
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cum-classifier combination is the predicate of ‘apple’, and raises to a position to the left of its subject in the course of the derivation. The emergence of the ‘possessive marker’ -l^yis clearly a reflex of this predicate movement process - as a matter of fact, Korean provides just the kind of evidence for a close link between -iy and predicate movement: for when the numeral-cum-classifier combination stays downstairs. to the right of ‘apple’, no -iy shows up (cf. sakwa se-kii ‘apple three-CLASS’)! This is a splendid illustration of the general idea that ‘possessive markers’ like Korean -cl are linkers - the reflexes of the application of the syntactic operation of Predicate Inversion (cf. Den Dikken, 1998, for extensive discussion and references to other relevant literature). Jun and Kang come very close to treating -;y in such terms. They place the marker under a functional head. Unfortunately, they systematically refer to -iy as the ‘possessive marker’ and label the functional head that harbours it ‘Pass‘ but at the end of the day, nomenclature is uninteresting; the central insight which Jun and Kang’s paper clearly incorporates is that -?y is a linker element, and as such is a close counterpart to English of and its cognates in the Germanic and Romance languages. There are a couple of other things worthy of note in the paper by Jun and Kang, if only because they pose interesting questions (which, unfortunately, the authors contribute little to by way of a solution). Thus, the paper mentions in passing (p. 54). without illustrating the point, that the marker -?‘I is obligatory with a singulur. pronominal possessor but optional with a plural pronominal possessor - a tantalising fact which, one hopes, will somehow fall into place given a proper understanding of the syntax of number in Korean. Jun and Kang also point out that, while obligatory in DPs like Max’s sadness or Korea’s Gctory, the marker -iy turns out to be perfectly optional in the Korean counterparts of English noun phrases like Max’s hrothe/-/car (cf. MUX(+) tongstinggicha ‘Max(-Pass) brother/car’) - a fact that is interesting enough in and of itself, but which becomes even more intriguing when we real&e that -iy becomes obligatory in the latter contexts. too, as soon as an adjectival modifier is added to the possessum (cf. Max*(-l^y) B/in tongs&q ‘Max-pass young brother’). Jun and Kang provide a structural analysis of such DPs which allows them to formulate a descriptive generalisation governing the distribution of -fy in these contexts - “la t&e possessive Pass” doit &tre morphologiquement explicite si elle ne gouveme pas directement le NumP” (p. 45) - but obviously this generalisation is little more than a sophisticated restatement of the facts. One would like to know more about the syntax of adjectival modification in Korean to find out what is at stake here. Follow-up research devoted specifically to the role played by adjectival modification in the domain of the distribution of -iy will no doubt enhance our general understanding of the workings of linker elements inside the noun phrase. It is tempting to think that the distribution of -iy in the Korean possessed noun phrase mimics to some degree that of the construct and free states in Semitic, such that the variant of ‘Max’s brother/car’ without -Ey would be the counterpart of the construct state (cf. Hebrew heyt ha-morat ‘house the-teacher’) while the form with the marker would be a free-state construction (cf. ha-hayit Sel ha-moru ‘the house of the-teacher’). The fact that only the variant with -iy is grammatical when the possessum is adjectivally modified could then perhaps be tied to the fact that in Semitic
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construct states, the possessum cannot be directly modified by an adjective (that is to say, no adjective can intervene between the possessum and the possessor in a Hebrew construct state; if the possessum is to be modified, the modifier must be placed to the right of the possessor, something which, if the lexical items are chosen appropriately, gives rise to systematic ambiguity: the modifier can be construed with either the possessor or the possessum). I do not have the competence to venture an analysis of the Korean data in terms of the construct/free state distinction; but the idea is certainly enhanced by the fact that Jun and Kang’s study of Korean possessed noun phrases is followed in this book by an analysis of the construct state by Alain Kihm - which goes to show that sometimes the mere accident of reading two papers one after the other can lead to surprising insights. Kihm’s paper is a good read. It seeks to reconcile two apparently conflicting approaches to the Hebrew construct state (Ritter, 1988, and Borer, 1996) by preserving the essence of Ritter’s raising analysis and copying into it the major contribution of Borer’s study of construct-state process nominals (like the destruction of the city). Kihm’s original contribution here is the idea that Borer’s VP-based analysis of the latter (in which a VP is embedded under a nominal superstructure) should be extended to ‘simple’ construct-state possessed noun phrases like the house of the teacher - that is, in the syntactic representation of such possessed noun phrases we find an abstract VP, headed by the copula. The copula takes the possessor as its subject, and selects a PP headed by an abstract preposition corresponding to ‘with’. Basically, then, Kihm represents construct states underlyingly as copular predications paraphrasable as ‘the possessor is with the possessum’. In the course of the derivation, the possessum incorporates, first into the abstract preposition and then into the abstract copula, to finally make its way up to D (this last step mimicking Ritter’s analysis). The possessor will ultimately raise to SpecDP at LF, which accounts for the fact that it is the definiteness of the possessor that contributes the definiteness of the entire possessed noun phrase. For the free state, by contrast, Kihm avails himself of a basic structure in which everything centres around the preposition ‘to’, the copula this time taking the possessum as its subject and selecting a ‘to’-headed PP harbouring the possessor: ‘the possessum is to the possessor’. On the basis of this underlying structure, which is itself embedded in a reduced (tenseless) relative clause headed by the complementiser k
lying representation of possessive relationships, ‘with’ and ‘to’, the choice between which determines whether the possessum is a P-complement (in the case of ‘with’, as in construct states) or a subject (in the case of ‘to’, as in free states). In the latter respect, Kihm exposes himself as a follower of the Benveniste/Freeze/Kayne line on the P-based roots of possession, extending it by identifying not just one but two prepositions as possible sources for possessive relationships. This extension is interesting in and of itself, and deserves careful consideration. My only worry is that I fail to see, in Kihm’s paper as it stands, what the argument is for the ‘with’-based analysis of constructs - or, put differently, why we could not derive all Semitic possessed noun phrases from a ‘to’-based structure. True. it might be a little harder to make sure the preposition is null in constructs if one starts out from a ‘to’-based structure in which the possessum is the subject of the dative PP: but then again, Kihm’s own analysis, according to which N first incorporates into P and then the P+N complex incorporates into the copula and raises further up to D, poses questions concerning the triggers for movement as well - in particular. why should each of these incorporation steps be happening? What Kihm says about this is that the copula and P have interpretable features which, “&ant abstraits. il faut qu’ils soient port& par du materiel lexical distinct” (‘being abstract, they must be borne by distinct lexical material’), the rationale for which eludes me. The same is true for a number of other claims and assumptions that are made in the course of the discussion. But be that as it may, Kihm’s analysis of the construct and free states overall looks very interesting. At least as interesting is Marie-Laurence Knittel’s creative and careful account of Hungarian possessed nominal phrases, in a paper which is not only right in the middle of the book but to me also stands out as the centre-piece of the volume as a whole (though here I may be biased by personal preferences; cf. Den Dikken, 1999. for my own perspective on the structure of the Hungarian possessed noun phrase). The Hungarian possessed noun phrase has received a good deal of attention in the generative syntactic literature (cf. esp. Szabolcsi. 1994, and also your humble servant’s paper referred to immediately above); but Knittel’s study is a particularly thorough and thoughtful one, one that I recommend to anyone who is interested in the structure of possessive DPs in Hungarian and in general - for Knittel not only analyses the Hungarian data in great detail but also presents a perspective on the functional structure of possessed noun phrases that is very explicit and strikingly similar to that of the sentence (especially in the Agr-based system of Chomsky. 1993). In a nutshell, what Knittel ends up proposing for possessed noun phrases with a nominative pronominal possessor like az e’n hdrom h&-am ‘the I three house- 1so, i.e., my three houses’ is a structure in which the possessor (which starts out in the specifier of PossP, the functional projection immediatelyoutside NP) raises up via SpecNumP and SpecAgrP to SpecTopP, the functional projection directly embedded under D; the numeral quantifier hdrom ‘three’ is sitting in the specifier position of a QP which is situated between TopP and AgrP - the counterpart of FocP in the structure of clauses (cf. Brody, 1995). The possessed noun raises up to the head of QP and no further, just like the finite verb raises up to Foe and no further. All in all. this
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derivation mimics closely the derivation of a Hungarian embedded clause featuring a topic and a focus: to the right of the complementiser or definite article we find the topic, followed by the focus (which, inside the noun phrase, is apparently always quantificational - something which actually raises a non-trivial question in the light of the fact that quantificational elements cannot occupy SpecFocP in the Hungarian clause), which in turn is followed by the lexical head of the structure (the finite verb or possessed noun). Nominative pronominal possessors (whenever overt) must be preceded by the definite article (cf. *(a~) hn hQzam ‘the I house-1%‘). Nominative fill-nominal possessors, on the other hand, are preceded by the definite article only if the full noun phrase supports a definite article independently - so while a personal proper name like J&zos ‘John’ allows (but does not require) a definite article to its left (subject to speaker variation), a proper name like Budapest never does; and concomitantly, a possessed noun phrase with J&zos as its nominative possessor can (but does not have to) be introduced by the definite article, while one featuring Budapest as its nominative possessor cannot (cf. (*a) Budapest utccii ‘the Budapest streets, i.e., Budapest’s streets’). Knittel accounts for these facts without recourse to Szabolcsi’s (1994) notorious ‘haplology rule’ (which, as the author shows, could never cover the whole range of data in any event), arguing that the position of full-nominal nominative possessors is higher than that of their pronominal counterparts: while the latter land in SpecTopP, below D, full-nominal nominative possessors take one additional step, raising all the way to SpecDP. The D-head is obligatorily null whenever SpecDP is occupied (cf. the generalised ‘doubly-filled Comp filter’); hence the only definite articles which will ever show up in the immediate vicinity of the full-nominal nominative possessor are those that properly belong to the possessor - an apparently correct result. Their structural position in the extended projection of the possessed noun is not the only difference between pronominal and full-nominal possessors - in the case of third person plural possessors, the full-nominal ones bear a number marker with the agreement marker on the possessed noun having the default singular form (a fi&k hdz-a ‘the boys house-3sG’), while the pronominal ones are themselves unmarked for number with the possessed noun this time bearing the plural suffix (uz 0”hdz-uk ‘the (s)he house-3PL, i.e., their house’). This anti-agreement property of possessed noun phrases in Hungarian is discussed in detail, in relation to anti-agreement phenomena in Welsh, in Den Dikken (1999). Knittel does not capture the links with anti-agreement phenomena in other languages in the analysis proposed (in fact, Knittel’s functionalist ‘economy’ type approach to the expression of number in the possessed noun phrase, which is very similar to Szabolcsi’s, 1994, is certainly not on the right track; see Den Dikken, 1999, for a critique), but does have something potentially interesting to say about the difference in behaviour between pronouns inside DP and pronominal subjects of clauses. Knittel suggests, following Zribi-Hertz and Mbolatianavalona (1999) for Malagasy, that pronominal possessors in Hungarian are structurally deficient: they lack NumP. As a consequence, they cannot be marked for number at all. And moreover, they are claimed not to be predisposed to take a [+human] antecedent, just like the deficient pronouns of Malagasy but unlike their
phonologically identical counterparts in the subject position of the Hungarian clause. Concretely, then, Knittel claims that while in 0”PI ‘(s)he/*it lives’ the pronoun must be [+human] (which apparently is a function of the presence of Num), in az 0”ablaka ‘the (s)he/it window’ the pronoun can refer to a non-human (e.g., a house). It would indeed be very interesting if the lack of number on (third person) nominative possessive pronouns versus the presence of number on their counterparts in clausal subject positions correlated with a difference in sensitivity to the feature [*human]: unfortunately, however, I have not found speakers who volunteered to confirm Knittel’s claim that in az 0”abfaka the pronoun can pick a non-human referent. The parallel with Malagasy deficient pronouns thus seems not to be perfect after all. After a brief discussion of the difference between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ agreement in Hungarian (which Knittel seeks to recast in terms of the feature [+specific] of the object - an approach, however, which would lead one to expect indefinite objects with a specific interpretation to trigger ‘objective’ agreement, contrary to fact), Knittel closes the paper with an account of darilv-marked possessors. Those readers familiar with Szabolcsi’s (1994) analysis of the Hungarian possessive DP will recall that she proposed an account according to which the nominative possessor ‘obtained’ dative morphology as a result of raising to SpecDP. Knittel obviously cannot follow Szabolcsi on this score - for in Knittel’s analysis of nominati\v fullnominal possessors, the possessor is actually in SpecDP yet not dative-marked. The author rightly criticises Szabolcsi’s approach to dative possessors, and presents an alternative analysis according to which the dative is base-generated in SpecDP, binding a null (resumptive) pronoun in SpecTopP. This analysis is essentially equivalent to one of the two parallel analyses of dative possessives proposed in Den Dikken ( 1999), r.~cq?t that while I assumed that the dative is Case-marked by a dative preposition, Knittel assumes that dative morphology is basically a ‘weak’ form of agreement. That is, Knittel likens the -nak of a kutydknak in the noun phrase a kutyciknuk bar-a&a ‘the dogs-DAT biting(N)-3sc;’ to the -nuk of harapnak in the clause (I kt+cjk hur-aptzak ‘(the) dogs bite-3PL’. It seems to me, however, that the two incarnations of -nak are just accidentally homophonous (they did not develop along parallel lines in the history of Hungarian, as far as I am aware). and that a more profitable approach to dative-marked possessors would be to treat them as cgen~titte datives. originating in a dative PP much like the one that underlies possessive relationships in the Benveniste/Freeze/Kayne approach to possession (cf. also Kihm’s paper, excerpted above). Such an approach allows us to better account for the variation in speaker judgements with respect to number agreement on the possessed nominal (cf. Den Dikken, 1999, for details), and assimilates the dative possessor construction of Hungarian to parallel cases in languages in which the possessor is undeniably durilv - like German den? Mann win Hztnd ‘the man-DAT his hat’, or similar examples from Alsatian French brought up in a footnote (fn. 37 on p. 156) to Zribi-Hertz’s contribution to the volume (ci Pier-l-e sa balle est pradue ‘to Pierre his ball is lost’, directly parallel to Hungarian Pr’rel-nek u lahdkju vesxtt el ‘PCterDATthe ball-3sc got lost’). Now that Anne Zribi-Hertz has entered the stage via the back door, let me say a few words about her paper, which is concerned with French possessed noun phrases
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of the form son livre ‘his/her book’ and le sien ‘the his/hers’. After reviewing some of the earlier literature devoted to these constructions (in particular, work by Authier and Picallo), Zribi-Hertz goes on to present an analysis (close in spirit and to some degree even the letter of the earlier proposals reviewed) according to which son in son livre is not a possessive adjective but a ‘personal definite article’, while the sien of le sien is labelled a ‘personal adjective’, by virtue of its morphology. Both are formed in syntax; their person morpheme marks the finiteness of the noun phrase, on a par with person affixes in finite clauses. Along the way, Zribi-Hertz mentions some interesting data from varieties of French - in particular, c’est mon mien, a construction attested in non-standard French which combines the ‘personal definite article’ and the ‘personal adjective’; she does not show, however, how constructions of this sort would fit into her analysis. Though her paper is primarily concerned with French data, she does mention on the side some facts from Yatye (Kwa) which might arouse some readers’ special interest (though, unfortunately, the data are really too scant to serve as the backdrop to an analysis of possessive noun phrases and agreement in this language; and insisting that the finite agreement and possessive markers of Yatye are identical, the author also seems to overlook the tonal difference between the two, which in the Kwa languages is rarely innocuous). At the end of her paper, Zribi-Hertz briefly addresses the structure of French possessed noun phrases featuring de (like la halle de Pierre ‘the ball of Pierre’), in which de is analysed as the realisation of a genitival Kase head ‘K’ - an analysis which does not strike me as remotely as interesting as the one hinted at in the Jun and Kang paper on Korean -l”yin the same volume. The papers reviewed in the foregoing all concerned themselves in.large measure with the expression of possession inside the noun phrase. The two last papers in the book, by contrast, address the syntax of the verb hallelavoir - Jacqueline GuCron focusing largely on possessive havelavoir but extending her account to its incamation as an auxiliary of the perfect, and Heidi Harley keying her discussion primarily to the differences between causative and experiencer have in English. After first rejecting the idea that have is devoid of content and the hypothesis that it is derived from the copula he in syntax (cf. the P or D/P incorporation approaches in the Benveniste/Freeze/Kayne line of approach), Jacqueline Gueron goes on to argue that possessive structure is essentially equivalent to the structure of a perfect tense construction: both are said to define a temporal interval onto which a state is being projected. In the process of arguing this, she makes a number of bold statements which I do not fully understand - such as the hypothesis that “the person feature in Infl can be interpreted as a +D feature which fuses with the tense of the event E, creating a local deictic operator” (p. 176; this resurfaces on p. 183), the idea that a T/Lot operator “saturates the +D feature of a determiner” (p. 177), or the suggestion that “movement of the feature [lot] leaves a semantically impoverished verbal copy in the VP” (p. 178; my translations). What I also find somewhat difficult to grasp is how the subject of the clown amused the children or the ‘middle’ reading of Jean se lave facilement ‘Jean SE washes easily’ can be interpreted as an Instrument (p. 187) but anyway, this concerns an extension of the proposal for have, so I will leave it aside. Due to the large number of sweeping (and not-easy-to-relate-to)
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hypotheses it relies upon, I have difficulty properly evaluating Gdron’s proposal: but the account is definitely novel and interesting, and important material for anyone interested in the relationship between possessive and perfective have. Finally, there is Heidi Harley’s paper, which focuses specifically on causative and experiencer have (and uses only English data). Following closely in the footsteps of Robert Belvin’s (1993) approach to these two incarnations of hare (cf. also Belvin and Den Dikken, 1997), Harley argues that “the interpretation assigned to the IIU~YJ predicate does not arise from the have form itself. but rather is a consequence of a) the type of complement (DP or small clause) which ha11e takes and b) the presence or absence of a binding relation between the subject of ha\,e and some pronominal element in its complement” (p. 223). The importance of this binding relation was highlighted by Belvin on the basis of the fact that a hu\,e sentence like John had a little baby throw up typically gets a causative interpretation while its counterpart with a bound pronoun in the bare-infinitival VP (John had a little baby throti~ lrp OII him) is perfectly felicitous on a so-called ‘experiencer’ reading. where the referent of John is adversely affected by the event denoted by the infinitival predicate. Harley builds on this and shows that it actually is not enough to have something in the infinitival predicate which is anaphorically related to the matrix subject: in .lolln had milk poured on himlhimself, the ‘experiencer’ reading is available only when him is used: the logophoric reflexive himself does not make this reading possible. As a matter of fact, even when there is an element inside the infinitival predicate that is bound to the matrix subject, the presence of logophoric himself seems to block the ‘experiencer’
reading:
in Clinton
bud the Cumpaign
Finance
s&x~ommitree
s~rh-
his ~~icrpresident and himself today, the relevant reading is unavailable due to the presence of himself (while it is fine with aud him.seJf absent) despite the fact that there is a pronoun (his) linked to the matrix subject inside the infinitival constituent. What this shows, according to Harley, is that what is going awry in the experienter have examples with logophoric himself is that its antecedent is not intentional
poena
- here she takes her cue from Zribi-Hertz’s (1995) argument to the effect that the antecedent of logophoric himself must be intentional, combining this with the observational fact that the subject of experiencer halIe sentences is always non-intentional (a fact which Harley does not seem to actually derive but uses only as a given). After establishing this, Harley proceeds to an attempt to extend her analysis to the locative, alienable and inalienable possession readings of hu\,e. but here the binding facts are appreciably less crisp (and the consequences less straightforward) than one might desire, especially when it comes to the licensing of logophoric reflexives. Harley points out that in alienable possession constructions logophoric himsc!f is licensed (as in Calvin has a fancy red Porsche w~hich cornforrahl_v seats both Mat-\ und himself), and claims that this follows since in alienable possession contexts there is an intentional choice on the part of the possessor to ‘have’ the thing possessed: but by the same token one would then expect logophoric hinlselfnot to be licensed in inalienable and locative halIe sentences because the hnlle-subject is non-intentional - and here the data are less than perfectly clear: though locative “Cuh*in has a bee on himself does indeed seem awkward. I don’t find anything wrong with
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Harley’s inalienable possession example John has a terrible cold, and everyone is avoiding both his wife and himself, which she gives two question marks herself. The last part of Harley’s paper is devoted to an interesting discussion of the stative/eventive dichotomy in the domain of causative and experiencer have constructions. She argues that a stative reading for a have sentence results from embedding a ‘bare’ VP under it, while an eventive interpretation emerges when the complement of have is a Kratzerian VP headed by an event-introducing ‘light verb’. In other words, the eventivity of have sentences is inherited from have’s complement. That hypothesis opens up potentially interesting perspectives on event structure and aspect - though it remains to be seen how exactly the ‘inheritance’ of stativity/eventivity from a complement can be technically implemented. Let me close this review with a few quibbles about formal features of the book. A somewhat awkward feature of the book is the fact that the title pages of the individual contributions do not mention the names of the authors - these are retrievable only from the table of contents and the running headers on the even-numbered pages. The affiliations of the contributors are also not systematically disclosed in the book, some papers quoting the author’s full address at the end of the bibliography, others entirely lacking affiliations altogether. Proof-reading of especially the examples from languages other than French and English could definitely have been better as well - especially the Hungarian examples are riddled with errors. But these very minor glitches aside, on balance this is a collection of papers on the grammar of possession and have which contains a number of very valuable contributions to this research domain, papers which are a must for anyone thinking about problems of possession.
References Authier, J.-Marc, 1992. Is French a null subject language in the DP? Probus 4, l-16. Belvin, Robert, 1993. The two causative haves are the two possessive haves. In: V. Lindblad and M. Gamon (eds.), Papers from the Fifth Student Conference in Linguistics. MITWPL 20, 19-34. Belvin, Robert and Marcel den Dikken, 1997. There, happens, to, be, have. Lingua 101, 151-183. Benveniste, Emile, 1966. Problemes de linguistique gtntrale. Paris: Gallimard. Borer, Hagit, 1996. The construct in review. In: J. Lecarme, J. Lowenstamm and U. Shlonsky (eds.), Studies in Afroasiatic grammar, 30-61. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics. Borschev, Vladimir and Barbara H. Partee, 1999. Semantic types and the Russian genitive modifier construction. In: K. Dziwirek et al. (eds.), Formal approaches to Slavic linguistics [The Seattle Meeting, 19981, 39-57. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications. Brody, Michael, 1995. Focus and checking theory. In: I. Kenesei (ed.), Approaches to Hungarian V, 3143. Szeged: JATE Press. Chomsky, Noam, 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In: K. Hale and S.J. Keyser, eds.;, The view from Building 20. Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, l-52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dikken, Marcel den, 1998. Predicate Inversion in DP. In: A. Alexiadou and C. Wilder (eds.), Possessors, predicates and movement in the determiner phrase, 177-214. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dikken, Marcel den, 1999. On the structural representation of possession and agreement: The case of (anti-)agreement in Hungarian possessed noun phrases. In 1. Kenesei (ed.), Crossing boundaries, 137-l 77. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Espafiol-Echevarria, Manuel, 1997. Inalienable possession in copulative contexts and the DP-structure. Lingua IO. 21 i-244. Freeze, Ray, 1992. Existentials and other locatives. Language 68, 553-596. Kayne, Richard. 1993. Toward a modular theory of auxiliary selection. Studia Linguistica 47. 3-3 I. Kayne, Richard. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kratzer. Angelika, 1993. On external arguments. UMOP 17. 103-I 30. Picallo, M. Cam& 1994. Catalan possessive pronouns: The Avoid Pronoun Principle revisited. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 12, 259-299. Ritter, Elizabeth. 1988. A head-movement approach to construct state noun phrases. Linguistic\ 26. 909-929. Siloni. Tali. 1997. Event nominals and the construct state. In: L. Haegeman (ed.), The new comparative syntax, 365-188. London: Longman. Szabolcsi, Anna, 1994. The noun phrase. In: F. Kiefer and Katalin l? Kis\ (eds.), The syntactic structure of Hungarian (Syntax and semantics 27). 179-274. New York: Academic Press. Veselovsk& Ludmila, 1995. Phrasal movement and X”-morphology : Word order parallels in Czech and English nominal and verbal projections. Ph.D. dissertation. Universita PalackCho. Olomouc. Czech Republic. Zribi-Hertz. Anne, 1995. Emphatic or reflexive’! On the endophoric character of French Irri-t&m, and similar complex pronouns. Journal of Linguistics 3 I. 333-374. Zribi-Hertz. Anne and Liliane Mbolatianavalona. 1999. Towards a modular theory of linguistic deficiency: Evidence from Malagasy personal pronouns. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17. lhl-21X.
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Book review Jacqueline GuCron and Anne Zribi-Hertz (eds.), La granzn-rail-r de la possr.ssio~~. Nanterre: Universite Paris X. 1998. (226 pp.). ISBN 2 9509367 I 7. FF. 100.00. Reviewed by Marcel den Dikken, Linguistics Program, CUNY Graduate Center. 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309, USA. The grammar of possession is a rich and rewarding research domain, sure to give rise to discussions of a wide variety of different languages (since the expression of possession varies greatly from one language to the next) and to results bearing on the structure of sentences and noun phrases and the structural representation of argument and event structure. In 1997 I edited a special issue of Ling:uu on the syntax of possession and the verb ‘have’. More recently, Jacqueline Gueron and Anne ZribiHertz, who have individually contributed important work in this domain. have brought together a number of studies on the syntax of possession in their book Lo granzmaire de lu possession, published by the University of Paris X. As the blurb text discloses, the studies contained herein are the outcome of a collective reflection on the grammar of possession organised by the ‘Jeune Equipe’ of this university and CNRWaris-8. The book features seven separate studies plus a general introduction (written by the editors) to the theoretical framework of which the studies avail themselves. Of the eight papers, seven are written in French: only Heidi Harley’s contribution (the last one in the book; the two papers specifically devoted to the verb ha\,c have been lifted out of a sequence which is otherwise ordered alphabetically by author, and appear at the end) is in English, although it gets a French title in the table of contents and as the running header. The overall result is a somewhat diverse collection of papers on the general theme of the grammar of possession, some largely descriptive in nature. some highly theoretical, and some sailing a course in between the two extremes. I read the book linearly, from cover to cover, passing through two data oriented discussions of possessed noun phrases (one on Czech, the other on Korean) on my way to a theoretically novel approach to the construct state, then returning to a data-centred study on Hungarian possessed nominals (with very interesting discussion of the theoretical repercussions of the facts), subsequently being treated on an analysis of French possessives of the type son 1ilv.e ‘his/her book’ and le sien ‘[the] his/hers’. a heavy-duty theoretical story about possessive and perfective /Tulle and, finally. a 037%2166/00/$ PII:
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paper which addresses possession only from the margin, being primarily concerned with the causative and experiencer uses of have in English. It is curious that it is precisely this last paper which, although it ventures well outside the realm defined by the title of the book, tries explicitly to link itself to other papers contained in the volume. The connections between the studies are generally loose, and the editors’ introduction - or, for that matter, the picture of the Tower of Babel on the front cover does little to enhance the idea that the various authors are speaking with one voice. In what follows I will attempt to tie the papers together somewhat more closely, though on the whole I will largely confine myself to a brief discussion of the highlights of each of the contributions to the volume. Jean-Francois Bourdin discusses morphosyntactic aspects of the expression of possession in Czech noun phrases, focusing in particular on the well-known Slavic trait of ‘possessive adjectives’. His brief study serves as a good overview of the basic facts that any analysis will need to come to terms with, but although Lida Veselovska’s (1995) detailed account of Czech noun-phrase structure, embedded in the DP hypothesis, is cast aside as a representative of “un cadre minimaliste ou la proliferation des categories fonctionelles n’a pas encore rencontre Guillaume d’Ockham” (fn. 4, p. 27) Bourdin does not himself contribute much in the way of an analysis of the Czech data. Along the way, Bourdin briefly addresses the question of whether things like the books are John’s in Czech should receive a predicative AP analysis or one in terms of an elliptical noun phrase featuring an attributive AP - and hc shows that, although gapping might constitute an argument in favour of the ellipsis approach, there are also examples (such as the Czech counterpart of nothing here is John’s) for which one would be hard-pressed defending an analysis along ellipsis lines. In their recent work on predicate possessives, Borschev and Partee (1999) come to essentially the same conclusion, with reference to Russian and English data. But in Korean, as Jae-Yeon Jun and Ok-Kyung Kang point out in their joint contribution, predicate possessives corresponding to English this book is John’s are not structurally ambiguous: they appear to support an ellipsis analysis (‘the one of John’) only. In this respect, they are a lot like their French (celui de Jean) or Dutch (die van Jan ‘that of John’) counterparts - also with respect to the marker they use on the possessor: the -iy of Korean behaves a lot like French de, Dutch van, or English qf, for that matter. What is especially interesting is that the distribution of the ‘possessive marker’ -iy seems to be correlated with Predicate Inversion inside the nominal phrase. Thus, Jun and Kang point to Korean examples which seem to parallel to a significant degree Spanish constructions of the type guupo de cara ‘pretty of face, pretty-faced’, discussed by Espafiol-Echevarria (1997) in the Lingua issue that I referred to above. An example of this sort provided by Jun and Kang is cu~r~ny&4 nai ‘middle-Pass age, i.e., middle-aged’ - something which has a close counterpart in the nominalised adjectival construction by which the Dutch refer to ‘the aged’: o&en vulz dugen ‘old+L of days, (the ones who are) old of age’. Jun and Kang refer to cases of the type just discussed as involving ‘predicats inverses’ (inverted predicates), and I believe them wholeheartedly, also where they propose a Predicate Inversion approach to quantificational noun phrases featuring -?y such as se k&y sakwu ‘three CLASS-POSS apple, i.e., three apples’ - the numeral-
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cum-classifier combination is the predicate of ‘apple’, and raises to a position to the left of its subject in the course of the derivation. The emergence of the ‘possessive marker’ -l^yis clearly a reflex of this predicate movement process - as a matter of fact, Korean provides just the kind of evidence for a close link between -iy and predicate movement: for when the numeral-cum-classifier combination stays downstairs. to the right of ‘apple’, no -iy shows up (cf. sakwa se-kii ‘apple three-CLASS’)! This is a splendid illustration of the general idea that ‘possessive markers’ like Korean -cl are linkers - the reflexes of the application of the syntactic operation of Predicate Inversion (cf. Den Dikken, 1998, for extensive discussion and references to other relevant literature). Jun and Kang come very close to treating -;y in such terms. They place the marker under a functional head. Unfortunately, they systematically refer to -iy as the ‘possessive marker’ and label the functional head that harbours it ‘Pass‘ but at the end of the day, nomenclature is uninteresting; the central insight which Jun and Kang’s paper clearly incorporates is that -?y is a linker element, and as such is a close counterpart to English of and its cognates in the Germanic and Romance languages. There are a couple of other things worthy of note in the paper by Jun and Kang, if only because they pose interesting questions (which, unfortunately, the authors contribute little to by way of a solution). Thus, the paper mentions in passing (p. 54). without illustrating the point, that the marker -?‘I is obligatory with a singulur. pronominal possessor but optional with a plural pronominal possessor - a tantalising fact which, one hopes, will somehow fall into place given a proper understanding of the syntax of number in Korean. Jun and Kang also point out that, while obligatory in DPs like Max’s sadness or Korea’s Gctory, the marker -iy turns out to be perfectly optional in the Korean counterparts of English noun phrases like Max’s hrothe/-/car (cf. MUX(+) tongstinggicha ‘Max(-Pass) brother/car’) - a fact that is interesting enough in and of itself, but which becomes even more intriguing when we real&e that -iy becomes obligatory in the latter contexts. too, as soon as an adjectival modifier is added to the possessum (cf. Max*(-l^y) B/in tongs&q ‘Max-pass young brother’). Jun and Kang provide a structural analysis of such DPs which allows them to formulate a descriptive generalisation governing the distribution of -fy in these contexts - “la t&e possessive Pass” doit &tre morphologiquement explicite si elle ne gouveme pas directement le NumP” (p. 45) - but obviously this generalisation is little more than a sophisticated restatement of the facts. One would like to know more about the syntax of adjectival modification in Korean to find out what is at stake here. Follow-up research devoted specifically to the role played by adjectival modification in the domain of the distribution of -iy will no doubt enhance our general understanding of the workings of linker elements inside the noun phrase. It is tempting to think that the distribution of -iy in the Korean possessed noun phrase mimics to some degree that of the construct and free states in Semitic, such that the variant of ‘Max’s brother/car’ without -Ey would be the counterpart of the construct state (cf. Hebrew heyt ha-morat ‘house the-teacher’) while the form with the marker would be a free-state construction (cf. ha-hayit Sel ha-moru ‘the house of the-teacher’). The fact that only the variant with -iy is grammatical when the possessum is adjectivally modified could then perhaps be tied to the fact that in Semitic
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construct states, the possessum cannot be directly modified by an adjective (that is to say, no adjective can intervene between the possessum and the possessor in a Hebrew construct state; if the possessum is to be modified, the modifier must be placed to the right of the possessor, something which, if the lexical items are chosen appropriately, gives rise to systematic ambiguity: the modifier can be construed with either the possessor or the possessum). I do not have the competence to venture an analysis of the Korean data in terms of the construct/free state distinction; but the idea is certainly enhanced by the fact that Jun and Kang’s study of Korean possessed noun phrases is followed in this book by an analysis of the construct state by Alain Kihm - which goes to show that sometimes the mere accident of reading two papers one after the other can lead to surprising insights. Kihm’s paper is a good read. It seeks to reconcile two apparently conflicting approaches to the Hebrew construct state (Ritter, 1988, and Borer, 1996) by preserving the essence of Ritter’s raising analysis and copying into it the major contribution of Borer’s study of construct-state process nominals (like the destruction of the city). Kihm’s original contribution here is the idea that Borer’s VP-based analysis of the latter (in which a VP is embedded under a nominal superstructure) should be extended to ‘simple’ construct-state possessed noun phrases like the house of the teacher - that is, in the syntactic representation of such possessed noun phrases we find an abstract VP, headed by the copula. The copula takes the possessor as its subject, and selects a PP headed by an abstract preposition corresponding to ‘with’. Basically, then, Kihm represents construct states underlyingly as copular predications paraphrasable as ‘the possessor is with the possessum’. In the course of the derivation, the possessum incorporates, first into the abstract preposition and then into the abstract copula, to finally make its way up to D (this last step mimicking Ritter’s analysis). The possessor will ultimately raise to SpecDP at LF, which accounts for the fact that it is the definiteness of the possessor that contributes the definiteness of the entire possessed noun phrase. For the free state, by contrast, Kihm avails himself of a basic structure in which everything centres around the preposition ‘to’, the copula this time taking the possessum as its subject and selecting a ‘to’-headed PP harbouring the possessor: ‘the possessum is to the possessor’. On the basis of this underlying structure, which is itself embedded in a reduced (tenseless) relative clause headed by the complementiser k
lying representation of possessive relationships, ‘with’ and ‘to’, the choice between which determines whether the possessum is a P-complement (in the case of ‘with’, as in construct states) or a subject (in the case of ‘to’, as in free states). In the latter respect, Kihm exposes himself as a follower of the Benveniste/Freeze/Kayne line on the P-based roots of possession, extending it by identifying not just one but two prepositions as possible sources for possessive relationships. This extension is interesting in and of itself, and deserves careful consideration. My only worry is that I fail to see, in Kihm’s paper as it stands, what the argument is for the ‘with’-based analysis of constructs - or, put differently, why we could not derive all Semitic possessed noun phrases from a ‘to’-based structure. True. it might be a little harder to make sure the preposition is null in constructs if one starts out from a ‘to’-based structure in which the possessum is the subject of the dative PP: but then again, Kihm’s own analysis, according to which N first incorporates into P and then the P+N complex incorporates into the copula and raises further up to D, poses questions concerning the triggers for movement as well - in particular. why should each of these incorporation steps be happening? What Kihm says about this is that the copula and P have interpretable features which, “&ant abstraits. il faut qu’ils soient port& par du materiel lexical distinct” (‘being abstract, they must be borne by distinct lexical material’), the rationale for which eludes me. The same is true for a number of other claims and assumptions that are made in the course of the discussion. But be that as it may, Kihm’s analysis of the construct and free states overall looks very interesting. At least as interesting is Marie-Laurence Knittel’s creative and careful account of Hungarian possessed nominal phrases, in a paper which is not only right in the middle of the book but to me also stands out as the centre-piece of the volume as a whole (though here I may be biased by personal preferences; cf. Den Dikken, 1999. for my own perspective on the structure of the Hungarian possessed noun phrase). The Hungarian possessed noun phrase has received a good deal of attention in the generative syntactic literature (cf. esp. Szabolcsi. 1994, and also your humble servant’s paper referred to immediately above); but Knittel’s study is a particularly thorough and thoughtful one, one that I recommend to anyone who is interested in the structure of possessive DPs in Hungarian and in general - for Knittel not only analyses the Hungarian data in great detail but also presents a perspective on the functional structure of possessed noun phrases that is very explicit and strikingly similar to that of the sentence (especially in the Agr-based system of Chomsky. 1993). In a nutshell, what Knittel ends up proposing for possessed noun phrases with a nominative pronominal possessor like az e’n hdrom h&-am ‘the I three house- 1so, i.e., my three houses’ is a structure in which the possessor (which starts out in the specifier of PossP, the functional projection immediatelyoutside NP) raises up via SpecNumP and SpecAgrP to SpecTopP, the functional projection directly embedded under D; the numeral quantifier hdrom ‘three’ is sitting in the specifier position of a QP which is situated between TopP and AgrP - the counterpart of FocP in the structure of clauses (cf. Brody, 1995). The possessed noun raises up to the head of QP and no further, just like the finite verb raises up to Foe and no further. All in all. this
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derivation mimics closely the derivation of a Hungarian embedded clause featuring a topic and a focus: to the right of the complementiser or definite article we find the topic, followed by the focus (which, inside the noun phrase, is apparently always quantificational - something which actually raises a non-trivial question in the light of the fact that quantificational elements cannot occupy SpecFocP in the Hungarian clause), which in turn is followed by the lexical head of the structure (the finite verb or possessed noun). Nominative pronominal possessors (whenever overt) must be preceded by the definite article (cf. *(a~) hn hQzam ‘the I house-1%‘). Nominative fill-nominal possessors, on the other hand, are preceded by the definite article only if the full noun phrase supports a definite article independently - so while a personal proper name like J&zos ‘John’ allows (but does not require) a definite article to its left (subject to speaker variation), a proper name like Budapest never does; and concomitantly, a possessed noun phrase with J&zos as its nominative possessor can (but does not have to) be introduced by the definite article, while one featuring Budapest as its nominative possessor cannot (cf. (*a) Budapest utccii ‘the Budapest streets, i.e., Budapest’s streets’). Knittel accounts for these facts without recourse to Szabolcsi’s (1994) notorious ‘haplology rule’ (which, as the author shows, could never cover the whole range of data in any event), arguing that the position of full-nominal nominative possessors is higher than that of their pronominal counterparts: while the latter land in SpecTopP, below D, full-nominal nominative possessors take one additional step, raising all the way to SpecDP. The D-head is obligatorily null whenever SpecDP is occupied (cf. the generalised ‘doubly-filled Comp filter’); hence the only definite articles which will ever show up in the immediate vicinity of the full-nominal nominative possessor are those that properly belong to the possessor - an apparently correct result. Their structural position in the extended projection of the possessed noun is not the only difference between pronominal and full-nominal possessors - in the case of third person plural possessors, the full-nominal ones bear a number marker with the agreement marker on the possessed noun having the default singular form (a fi&k hdz-a ‘the boys house-3sG’), while the pronominal ones are themselves unmarked for number with the possessed noun this time bearing the plural suffix (uz 0”hdz-uk ‘the (s)he house-3PL, i.e., their house’). This anti-agreement property of possessed noun phrases in Hungarian is discussed in detail, in relation to anti-agreement phenomena in Welsh, in Den Dikken (1999). Knittel does not capture the links with anti-agreement phenomena in other languages in the analysis proposed (in fact, Knittel’s functionalist ‘economy’ type approach to the expression of number in the possessed noun phrase, which is very similar to Szabolcsi’s, 1994, is certainly not on the right track; see Den Dikken, 1999, for a critique), but does have something potentially interesting to say about the difference in behaviour between pronouns inside DP and pronominal subjects of clauses. Knittel suggests, following Zribi-Hertz and Mbolatianavalona (1999) for Malagasy, that pronominal possessors in Hungarian are structurally deficient: they lack NumP. As a consequence, they cannot be marked for number at all. And moreover, they are claimed not to be predisposed to take a [+human] antecedent, just like the deficient pronouns of Malagasy but unlike their
phonologically identical counterparts in the subject position of the Hungarian clause. Concretely, then, Knittel claims that while in 0”PI ‘(s)he/*it lives’ the pronoun must be [+human] (which apparently is a function of the presence of Num), in az 0”ablaka ‘the (s)he/it window’ the pronoun can refer to a non-human (e.g., a house). It would indeed be very interesting if the lack of number on (third person) nominative possessive pronouns versus the presence of number on their counterparts in clausal subject positions correlated with a difference in sensitivity to the feature [*human]: unfortunately, however, I have not found speakers who volunteered to confirm Knittel’s claim that in az 0”abfaka the pronoun can pick a non-human referent. The parallel with Malagasy deficient pronouns thus seems not to be perfect after all. After a brief discussion of the difference between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ agreement in Hungarian (which Knittel seeks to recast in terms of the feature [+specific] of the object - an approach, however, which would lead one to expect indefinite objects with a specific interpretation to trigger ‘objective’ agreement, contrary to fact), Knittel closes the paper with an account of darilv-marked possessors. Those readers familiar with Szabolcsi’s (1994) analysis of the Hungarian possessive DP will recall that she proposed an account according to which the nominative possessor ‘obtained’ dative morphology as a result of raising to SpecDP. Knittel obviously cannot follow Szabolcsi on this score - for in Knittel’s analysis of nominati\v fullnominal possessors, the possessor is actually in SpecDP yet not dative-marked. The author rightly criticises Szabolcsi’s approach to dative possessors, and presents an alternative analysis according to which the dative is base-generated in SpecDP, binding a null (resumptive) pronoun in SpecTopP. This analysis is essentially equivalent to one of the two parallel analyses of dative possessives proposed in Den Dikken ( 1999), r.~cq?t that while I assumed that the dative is Case-marked by a dative preposition, Knittel assumes that dative morphology is basically a ‘weak’ form of agreement. That is, Knittel likens the -nak of a kutydknak in the noun phrase a kutyciknuk bar-a&a ‘the dogs-DAT biting(N)-3sc;’ to the -nuk of harapnak in the clause (I kt+cjk hur-aptzak ‘(the) dogs bite-3PL’. It seems to me, however, that the two incarnations of -nak are just accidentally homophonous (they did not develop along parallel lines in the history of Hungarian, as far as I am aware). and that a more profitable approach to dative-marked possessors would be to treat them as cgen~titte datives. originating in a dative PP much like the one that underlies possessive relationships in the Benveniste/Freeze/Kayne approach to possession (cf. also Kihm’s paper, excerpted above). Such an approach allows us to better account for the variation in speaker judgements with respect to number agreement on the possessed nominal (cf. Den Dikken, 1999, for details), and assimilates the dative possessor construction of Hungarian to parallel cases in languages in which the possessor is undeniably durilv - like German den? Mann win Hztnd ‘the man-DAT his hat’, or similar examples from Alsatian French brought up in a footnote (fn. 37 on p. 156) to Zribi-Hertz’s contribution to the volume (ci Pier-l-e sa balle est pradue ‘to Pierre his ball is lost’, directly parallel to Hungarian Pr’rel-nek u lahdkju vesxtt el ‘PCterDATthe ball-3sc got lost’). Now that Anne Zribi-Hertz has entered the stage via the back door, let me say a few words about her paper, which is concerned with French possessed noun phrases
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of the form son livre ‘his/her book’ and le sien ‘the his/hers’. After reviewing some of the earlier literature devoted to these constructions (in particular, work by Authier and Picallo), Zribi-Hertz goes on to present an analysis (close in spirit and to some degree even the letter of the earlier proposals reviewed) according to which son in son livre is not a possessive adjective but a ‘personal definite article’, while the sien of le sien is labelled a ‘personal adjective’, by virtue of its morphology. Both are formed in syntax; their person morpheme marks the finiteness of the noun phrase, on a par with person affixes in finite clauses. Along the way, Zribi-Hertz mentions some interesting data from varieties of French - in particular, c’est mon mien, a construction attested in non-standard French which combines the ‘personal definite article’ and the ‘personal adjective’; she does not show, however, how constructions of this sort would fit into her analysis. Though her paper is primarily concerned with French data, she does mention on the side some facts from Yatye (Kwa) which might arouse some readers’ special interest (though, unfortunately, the data are really too scant to serve as the backdrop to an analysis of possessive noun phrases and agreement in this language; and insisting that the finite agreement and possessive markers of Yatye are identical, the author also seems to overlook the tonal difference between the two, which in the Kwa languages is rarely innocuous). At the end of her paper, Zribi-Hertz briefly addresses the structure of French possessed noun phrases featuring de (like la halle de Pierre ‘the ball of Pierre’), in which de is analysed as the realisation of a genitival Kase head ‘K’ - an analysis which does not strike me as remotely as interesting as the one hinted at in the Jun and Kang paper on Korean -l”yin the same volume. The papers reviewed in the foregoing all concerned themselves in.large measure with the expression of possession inside the noun phrase. The two last papers in the book, by contrast, address the syntax of the verb hallelavoir - Jacqueline GuCron focusing largely on possessive havelavoir but extending her account to its incamation as an auxiliary of the perfect, and Heidi Harley keying her discussion primarily to the differences between causative and experiencer have in English. After first rejecting the idea that have is devoid of content and the hypothesis that it is derived from the copula he in syntax (cf. the P or D/P incorporation approaches in the Benveniste/Freeze/Kayne line of approach), Jacqueline Gueron goes on to argue that possessive structure is essentially equivalent to the structure of a perfect tense construction: both are said to define a temporal interval onto which a state is being projected. In the process of arguing this, she makes a number of bold statements which I do not fully understand - such as the hypothesis that “the person feature in Infl can be interpreted as a +D feature which fuses with the tense of the event E, creating a local deictic operator” (p. 176; this resurfaces on p. 183), the idea that a T/Lot operator “saturates the +D feature of a determiner” (p. 177), or the suggestion that “movement of the feature [lot] leaves a semantically impoverished verbal copy in the VP” (p. 178; my translations). What I also find somewhat difficult to grasp is how the subject of the clown amused the children or the ‘middle’ reading of Jean se lave facilement ‘Jean SE washes easily’ can be interpreted as an Instrument (p. 187) but anyway, this concerns an extension of the proposal for have, so I will leave it aside. Due to the large number of sweeping (and not-easy-to-relate-to)
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hypotheses it relies upon, I have difficulty properly evaluating Gdron’s proposal: but the account is definitely novel and interesting, and important material for anyone interested in the relationship between possessive and perfective have. Finally, there is Heidi Harley’s paper, which focuses specifically on causative and experiencer have (and uses only English data). Following closely in the footsteps of Robert Belvin’s (1993) approach to these two incarnations of hare (cf. also Belvin and Den Dikken, 1997), Harley argues that “the interpretation assigned to the IIU~YJ predicate does not arise from the have form itself. but rather is a consequence of a) the type of complement (DP or small clause) which ha11e takes and b) the presence or absence of a binding relation between the subject of ha\,e and some pronominal element in its complement” (p. 223). The importance of this binding relation was highlighted by Belvin on the basis of the fact that a hu\,e sentence like John had a little baby throw up typically gets a causative interpretation while its counterpart with a bound pronoun in the bare-infinitival VP (John had a little baby throti~ lrp OII him) is perfectly felicitous on a so-called ‘experiencer’ reading. where the referent of John is adversely affected by the event denoted by the infinitival predicate. Harley builds on this and shows that it actually is not enough to have something in the infinitival predicate which is anaphorically related to the matrix subject: in .lolln had milk poured on himlhimself, the ‘experiencer’ reading is available only when him is used: the logophoric reflexive himself does not make this reading possible. As a matter of fact, even when there is an element inside the infinitival predicate that is bound to the matrix subject, the presence of logophoric himself seems to block the ‘experiencer’
reading:
in Clinton
bud the Cumpaign
Finance
s&x~ommitree
s~rh-
his ~~icrpresident and himself today, the relevant reading is unavailable due to the presence of himself (while it is fine with aud him.seJf absent) despite the fact that there is a pronoun (his) linked to the matrix subject inside the infinitival constituent. What this shows, according to Harley, is that what is going awry in the experienter have examples with logophoric himself is that its antecedent is not intentional
poena
- here she takes her cue from Zribi-Hertz’s (1995) argument to the effect that the antecedent of logophoric himself must be intentional, combining this with the observational fact that the subject of experiencer halIe sentences is always non-intentional (a fact which Harley does not seem to actually derive but uses only as a given). After establishing this, Harley proceeds to an attempt to extend her analysis to the locative, alienable and inalienable possession readings of hu\,e. but here the binding facts are appreciably less crisp (and the consequences less straightforward) than one might desire, especially when it comes to the licensing of logophoric reflexives. Harley points out that in alienable possession constructions logophoric himsc!f is licensed (as in Calvin has a fancy red Porsche w~hich cornforrahl_v seats both Mat-\ und himself), and claims that this follows since in alienable possession contexts there is an intentional choice on the part of the possessor to ‘have’ the thing possessed: but by the same token one would then expect logophoric hinlselfnot to be licensed in inalienable and locative halIe sentences because the hnlle-subject is non-intentional - and here the data are less than perfectly clear: though locative “Cuh*in has a bee on himself does indeed seem awkward. I don’t find anything wrong with
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review I
Lingua II0 (2000) 937-947
Harley’s inalienable possession example John has a terrible cold, and everyone is avoiding both his wife and himself, which she gives two question marks herself. The last part of Harley’s paper is devoted to an interesting discussion of the stative/eventive dichotomy in the domain of causative and experiencer have constructions. She argues that a stative reading for a have sentence results from embedding a ‘bare’ VP under it, while an eventive interpretation emerges when the complement of have is a Kratzerian VP headed by an event-introducing ‘light verb’. In other words, the eventivity of have sentences is inherited from have’s complement. That hypothesis opens up potentially interesting perspectives on event structure and aspect - though it remains to be seen how exactly the ‘inheritance’ of stativity/eventivity from a complement can be technically implemented. Let me close this review with a few quibbles about formal features of the book. A somewhat awkward feature of the book is the fact that the title pages of the individual contributions do not mention the names of the authors - these are retrievable only from the table of contents and the running headers on the even-numbered pages. The affiliations of the contributors are also not systematically disclosed in the book, some papers quoting the author’s full address at the end of the bibliography, others entirely lacking affiliations altogether. Proof-reading of especially the examples from languages other than French and English could definitely have been better as well - especially the Hungarian examples are riddled with errors. But these very minor glitches aside, on balance this is a collection of papers on the grammar of possession and have which contains a number of very valuable contributions to this research domain, papers which are a must for anyone thinking about problems of possession.
References Authier, J.-Marc, 1992. Is French a null subject language in the DP? Probus 4, l-16. Belvin, Robert, 1993. The two causative haves are the two possessive haves. In: V. Lindblad and M. Gamon (eds.), Papers from the Fifth Student Conference in Linguistics. MITWPL 20, 19-34. Belvin, Robert and Marcel den Dikken, 1997. There, happens, to, be, have. Lingua 101, 151-183. Benveniste, Emile, 1966. Problemes de linguistique gtntrale. Paris: Gallimard. Borer, Hagit, 1996. The construct in review. In: J. Lecarme, J. Lowenstamm and U. Shlonsky (eds.), Studies in Afroasiatic grammar, 30-61. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics. Borschev, Vladimir and Barbara H. Partee, 1999. Semantic types and the Russian genitive modifier construction. In: K. Dziwirek et al. (eds.), Formal approaches to Slavic linguistics [The Seattle Meeting, 19981, 39-57. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications. Brody, Michael, 1995. Focus and checking theory. In: I. Kenesei (ed.), Approaches to Hungarian V, 3143. Szeged: JATE Press. Chomsky, Noam, 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In: K. Hale and S.J. Keyser, eds.;, The view from Building 20. Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, l-52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dikken, Marcel den, 1998. Predicate Inversion in DP. In: A. Alexiadou and C. Wilder (eds.), Possessors, predicates and movement in the determiner phrase, 177-214. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dikken, Marcel den, 1999. On the structural representation of possession and agreement: The case of (anti-)agreement in Hungarian possessed noun phrases. In 1. Kenesei (ed.), Crossing boundaries, 137-l 77. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Espafiol-Echevarria, Manuel, 1997. Inalienable possession in copulative contexts and the DP-structure. Lingua IO. 21 i-244. Freeze, Ray, 1992. Existentials and other locatives. Language 68, 553-596. Kayne, Richard. 1993. Toward a modular theory of auxiliary selection. Studia Linguistica 47. 3-3 I. Kayne, Richard. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kratzer. Angelika, 1993. On external arguments. UMOP 17. 103-I 30. Picallo, M. Cam& 1994. Catalan possessive pronouns: The Avoid Pronoun Principle revisited. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 12, 259-299. Ritter, Elizabeth. 1988. A head-movement approach to construct state noun phrases. Linguistic\ 26. 909-929. Siloni. Tali. 1997. Event nominals and the construct state. In: L. Haegeman (ed.), The new comparative syntax, 365-188. London: Longman. Szabolcsi, Anna, 1994. The noun phrase. In: F. Kiefer and Katalin l? Kis\ (eds.), The syntactic structure of Hungarian (Syntax and semantics 27). 179-274. New York: Academic Press. Veselovsk& Ludmila, 1995. Phrasal movement and X”-morphology : Word order parallels in Czech and English nominal and verbal projections. Ph.D. dissertation. Universita PalackCho. Olomouc. Czech Republic. Zribi-Hertz. Anne, 1995. Emphatic or reflexive’! On the endophoric character of French Irri-t&m, and similar complex pronouns. Journal of Linguistics 3 I. 333-374. Zribi-Hertz. Anne and Liliane Mbolatianavalona. 1999. Towards a modular theory of linguistic deficiency: Evidence from Malagasy personal pronouns. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17. lhl-21X.