Detail #19: Instrumentals and Possessives

Many languages express X has Y somewhat along the lines of With X is Y. What case or adposition appears with X is language-specific, and can be locative or comitative or anything. Both Finnish and Russian use (mainly) locative expressions.

Some languages mark the object as some kind of oblique, though. English has a phrase that is somewhat similar to it:

She is with child.

Now, that is a rather special case, but illustrates the kind of marking I am discussing here. wals.info informs that this type of construction actually appears. Personally, I find some kind of instrumental marking to be very suitable for this (except maybe in certain specific types of phrases or under some circumstances - restricting this to non-human objects seems rather reasonable, for one, or some similar cultural restriction).

is.1sg  cup.instr - "I have a/the cup"

is.3pl dogs.instr = "they have dogs"

Furthermore, I find it reasonable that the instrumental case could be the case marking for any possessed noun -  the instrumental case doubling as head marking in possessive constructions. Why instrumental? Well, there seems to be a vague correlation between using a thing as a tool and owning it.

The idea by which it becomes evident that I am a one-trick pony is this: reflexive possession of objects marked by the noun object being marked by the instrumental case.

He drive.past.3sg car.instr = he drove his own car

He drive.past.3sg car.acc = he drove a/the car 

Alternatively, the distinction could work like this:

He drive.past.3sg his car.instr = he drove his own car

EDIT: reading through the earlier posts, seems this is fairly close to another post in content. Meh. It is an ok rephrasing that may be easier to understand for people not that familiar with ergativity and such. Well, I will leave it behind and try to avoid similar embarrassment in the future.

He drive.past.3sg his car.acc = he drove his (someone else's) car

Detail #10: Impermissible possession

Some languages have nouns that mandatorily have to be possessed. These often include body parts, family relations, and so on. How about nouns that cannot be marked as possessed using any nominal marking, but possessing them is possible by some uses of verbal voice, such as having the possessor be the causative subject, or the dative of a transitive verb, or even have the possessed subject demoted to object of an otherwise intransitive verb?

The language could even permit several of these periphrastic constructions and assign them to different registers or encode information about social status and deference in them.

Marking a permissibly possessed noun by any of these would be highly marked, and could indicate both disowning, distance or respect, depending on which construction is used.

I envision something along this table:

possessor <-> possessum
causative subject <-> the actor instigated to act on something (with transitive verbs that have been made causative)
subject of intr. verb <-> object of intr. verb (basically; there may be transitivizing morphology on the verb; still, the object is not properly or even syntactically an object in the language, as it should fail some syntactical as well as possibly other objecthood tests)
indirect object <-> subject (with both intransitive and transitive verbs)
oblique comitative* <-> causative subject
oblique comitative* <-> any non-subject

* in case the language has several different comitatives, the "most oblique" one, for some arbitrary measurement of obliqueness.