Dimensions of Possession - elchacocomoarealinguistica

198 Martin Riegel(24) Sa voiture i a été gravement accidentée. La carrosserie i est très abîmée,mais le moteur i est intact.Of all the characteristics brought to the fore in the literature dedicated to thoseconstructions 7 only one will be retained here, which confirms the consubstantialinterdependence between the whole and the parts via the iconic exploitationmade of that interdependence. When the action expressed by a directtransitive verb is exerted over the part of a whole, there are two kinds ofactantial splitting in French (Riegel 1991). On the one hand, the directcomplement represents the part directly affected, but the whole indirectlyinvolved comes out as a dative complement, often pronominal (20)–(21). Onthe other hand, if the action totally affects the whole, then this whole will bethe direct object, the part being seen as an indirect locative complementshowing the impact of the action (22). The occasional use of the possessivedeterminer to identify the part implies the loss or the change of this status.Such is the case for the first version of (23), where the referent of the object isviewed as the dentures of the subject.4. In order not to conclude . . .. . . too rapidly, it would be proper to relativize the impact of the analyses andhypotheses formulated in what precedes. First, they are only valid in Frenchwhere the metalinguistic term possession is certainly not the most appropriateto evoke the grammatical category it refers to in English and in German.Replacing it by participation or partitivité is a matter of cosmetic terminologybut does not settle the problem of determining the limits of the category thatis located on the border between lexicon, syntax, and ultimately the ontologyspecific to each language. Considering this last point of view it seems that theFrench language assigns narrower limits to the category in comparison withother languages. This is at least the picture we may have if we take intoaccount the idea that the part–whole relationships represent the basis (or thecentral instance) of a more general relationship that I called participation, ofwhich three other relationships are in fact extensions with a decreasing degreeof integration.In associating the general “participation’’ category with a conjunction ofsyntactic criteria and a definition liable to be adapted to a mereologicalcalculation it has been possible to delimit the field of the relationship in a