Dimensions of Possession - elchacocomoarealinguistica

Possessives as a source of definite articles? 249guages illustrating how a synchronic pattern of overlap in use may be areflection of a diachronic pattern of grammaticalization, we may arrive at thefollowing hypotheses:(7) H1: poss may — just like dem in some languages — grammaticalize intodef.H2: If poss grammaticalize into def, the process starts by an extensionwithin associative anaphora — not, as in the case of dem, with directanaphora.In order to evaluate these hypotheses, I have tried to follow up and check allclaims about possessives “used as definite articles’’ (or the like) found in aliterature survey of works on determiners, including general overviews such asKrámský (1972) as well as over 500 articles on specific languages or languagegroups. Among the languages mentioned in this connection, there are somefor which I have come to the conclusion that they — for separate reasons —are less likely candidates for languages with poss grammaticalizing or havinggrammaticalized into def. Two such languages are Armenian (Krámský 1972;Comrie 1981:182) and Tok Pisin (Sankoff and Mazzie 1991). I will leave theseout of the discussion here, and instead consider some of the more ‘promising’candidates.Thus, I will in the present discussion focus on four languages from threelanguage families for which I also have access to some primary data: Komi andUdmurt (‘Votyak’), two Permic languages that may represent several languagesin the Uralic family with poss claimed to be used as def; Turkish,representing several other Turkic languages and possibly other languages inthe Altaic language family; and, finally, Yucatec Maya, which as far as I knowis the only Mayan language to exhibit this phenomenon. I will also brieflyconsider the semitic language Amharic, for which I have only secondaryinformation, but which is claimed to have definite articles deriving frompossessives.In the next two sections I will discuss some possible evidence for andagainst the hypotheses by examining currently available data on theselanguages in some more detail and in the light of some things that weknow about grammaticalization processes in general (see e.g. Hopper1991; Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer 1991; Hopper and Traugott 1993),and the grammaticalization of demonstratives into definite articles inparticular.