Dimensions of Possession - elchacocomoarealinguistica

Ways of explaining possession 313• Permanent possession (Judy has a car but I use it all the time).• Inalienable possession (I have blue eyes).• Abstract possession (He has no time/no mercy).• Inanimate possession (My study has three windows).One may wonder whether e.g. “physical possession’’ or “inanimate possession’’should be called “possessive’’. I do not wish to discuss this issue here(see Heine 1997a for details; see also the Introduction), but as long as alinguistic construction expressing either or both of these is also used for otherpossessive notions in addition, I will not hesitate to call it a “possessiveconstruction’’.These are probably the main distinctions made in the cross-linguisticencoding of possession. Thus, most languages appear to have separate constructionsfor predicative and attributive possession, and for belong-constructionsand have-constructions. We will also expect that belong-constructionsare likely to be confined to the expression of permanent possession whilehave-constructions and attributive possession will cover several, or even all, ofthe possessive notions distinguished above, perhaps in addition to variousother meanings (Heine 1997a).My concern in this chapter is with question (v) raised above, namely: Howto explain why possession is encoded in language or languages the way it is? Iwill be concerned with a couple of peculiar structures and how they can beaccounted for. Accordingly, Section 2 deals with the notion “explanation’’ asit is understood here, in Section 3 some generalizations on the rise of possessiveconstructions are presented, and the remainder of the chapter is devotedto some problems associated with the expression of possession in Kxoe, aKhoisan language of southwestern Africa. The framework used is grammaticalizationtheory.2. On explanationIn the course of this book, a number of explanatory approaches have emerged.The kind of explanations I am concerned with here have the followingproperties (see Heine 1994: 257):a. They are multi-causal rather than mono-causal. While I will deal with onlyone causal parameter, I am aware that there are various other parametersthat also have to be taken into account. Language contact constitutes one