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March 3, 20260 citationsOpen Access

Dative external possessors in Ossetic

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NSNatalia SerdobolskayaOBOleg Belyaev

Key Points

  • Dative possessive NPs in Ossetic exhibit structural properties distinct from genitive NPs.
  • The dative NP, when doubled by a possessive proclitic, functions differently in clause structure.
  • Ossetic uses possessive proclitics as agreement markers akin to subject markers in pro-drop languages.
  • Unlike languages with double possessives, Ossetic does not have an internal position for dative possessors.

Abstract

Ossetic has two ways of marking possessors: by genitive or by dative. In the latter case, the dative NP has to be doubled by a possessive proclitic on the possessum. In this paper, we argue that while genitive NPs are adnominal, dative possessive NPs attach at clause level. We show that the dative is structure shared with poss inside the noun phrase, and the proclitic acts as an agreement marker, annotated similarly to subject markers in pro-drop languages. We further demonstrate that the Ossetic construction, while superficially similar to “double possessives” in Hungarian and Germanic, should be analyzed in a different way; most importantly, Ossetic lacks a NP/DP-internal position for the dative possessor.

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Cite This Study

Serdobolskaya et al. (2022) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69a75bbac6e9836116a23987https://doi.org/10.18148/lfg/2022.v27i.25
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