Monday, June 8, 2015

Detail #170: Possessive Comitative Constructions

To me, it is intuitively quite clear that the comitative is a context where a distinction between reflexive possession and other third person possession is somewhat more likely than in other oblique positions. In the spirit of that intuition, let's go for a peculiar construction for reflexive possession!

Let the comitative be marked by an adposition. When there's a reflexive possession going on between the subject and the comitative, i.e.
he1 went there with his1 wife
the language marks this by having a passive marker on the comitative adposition, thus
he1 went there with.PASS wife.
The alternative construction
he went there with his wife
would parse as
he1 went there with his2 wife .

No comments:

Post a Comment