External Possession Construction

In his book “Alignment Change in Iranian Languages”, Haig (2008) extensively studies what he calls external possession construction (EPC) in Iranian languages. He reviews the nature of the Old Persian Genitive and describes its function as including a quite broad but not fully arbitrary range of semantic roles. He recognizes Benefactive to be at the core of the functions of Genitive with the other attested functions as radial extensions from this meaning. He notes that Genitives cannot readily be classified based

on semantic roles. So it is difficult or nearly impossible to have a unique interpretation of the semantic role of an argument case-marked as Genitive.

He indicates that although the function of the Genitive could be described as a disjoint list of semantic functions, such a description is missing some significant generalizations for a number of reasons. First, such a list would be remarkably similar to the list of functions covered by Datives in a number of languages (particularly Indo-European languages), so such a list would not be purely arbitrary. Second, particular examples of the Genitive cannot be distinctly attributed to a single semantic role, so it might be the case that categorizing the Genitives based on semantic roles is not really relevant at all. So Haig suggests that rather than treating the Genitive as a list of disjoint and arbitrary semantic roles, it would be wiser to come up with a more coherent analysis.

He introduces the concept of indirect participation (as opposed to direct participation) as a coherent analysis that captures the function of the Genitive. At the core of the notion of indirect participation lays the Benefactive semantic role which is a sentient being, who is neither Agent nor Patient, but whose interests are affected by, or perceived to be affected by, the event expressed in the verb (Haig 2008:58). The notion of indirect participation is not readily compatible with analyses that work on a one- dimensional scale of control and affectedness, such as the scale of the thematic relations suggested by Van Valin (2001:31):

Agent > Experiencer > Recipient > Stimulus > Theme > Patient

But the notions of affectedness and control are not necessarily inversely related with some semantic roles such as benefactive or experiencer. In order to compensate for this incompatibility, Lehmann et al. (2004:7-9) proposes two dimensions of participation: direct and indirect. What necessitates the introduction of the second dimension, i.e. indirect participation, is the fact that events cannot be defined solely in terms of the participants directly involved in an event, and the participants for whom the event is, in one way or another, relevant should also be taken into account. The characteristic

representative of the dimension of indirect participation is the Benefactive, and it is not surprising that many languages have almost grammaticalized devices for expressing this role. By the definition of indirect participation, it is only natural that it is prototypically restricted to sentient beings, most commonly humans, who have subjective perception, i.e. a cognizance of personal interests. The notion of indirect participation in Iranian languages, Haig suggests, would be captured with the feature combination [+volitionality, -instigation, +affectedness]. Næss (2007) notes that this feature combination is typically displayed by the so-called “Datives” cross-linguistically. This domain generally covers the roles of recipients, benefactives and experiencers, with a fairly frequent extension to possessors (Næss 2007: 199). Figure 3-1 is a simplified overview of the semantic roles situated with respect to the two dimensions of direct and indirect participation.

Lehmann et al. (2004) note that the participant roles in the center of the model “become indistinct”, i.e. one could consider a single role as either direct or indirect. In this model, a bundle of semantic roles are defined by the dimension of indirect participation, and the Old Persian Genitive covers the area characterized by “maximum indirect participation”, which clearly does not include roles such as instrument or patient, both of which are direct participants.

Figure 3-1: The function of the Old Persian Genitive

Cross-linguistically, it is common that indirect participation is expressed using a single case. This single case is commonly Dative which often functions as coding of an external possessor. As Haspelmath (1999) explains, in an external possessor construction

(EPC), a possessive modifier occurs NP-externally as a constituent of the clause. This is

syntactically crucial since the possessor is a clause-level constituent rather than a sub- constituent of a NP. The semantic map of the functions typical of Dative case, as provided by Haspelmath (1999:126), covers categories including Predicative Possessor, Direction, Recipient/Addressee, Experiencer, Benefactive, External Possessor and Judicantis. This list, Haig suggests, could be applied “verbatim” to the Old Persian Genitive. So the Old Persian Genitive was functionally exhibiting a profile very similar to the Datives found in numerous modern Indo-European languages.

Haig views EPC as a type of construal made available by the semantics of indirect participation. So the term EPC is used to describe those instances of clause-level Genitives which can be interpreted as possessors. Syntactically, however, there seems to

be no distinction between clausal genitives which express external possessor, or benefactives, or experiencers. He assumes that in Old Iranian, the Genitive/Dative also coded the possessor in an EPC, where the possessor reading is only “one construal of the broader category of indirect participation”.

The construction studied in this work, i.e. PCP construction, is an instance of Haig’s EPC which is observed in Old Persian (and even more generally, in Old Iranian). The functional domain of PCP overlaps with the functional domain of Old Persian Genitive which includes a bundle of semantic roles, all of which could be described as having indirect participation. As Haig suggests, EPC is a type of construal of an event or state. Such a view is compatible with the notion of diathesis. The domain of indirect participation is like a cluster, with a more or less similar diathesis or construal. For expressing such a cluster, as noted in section 3.1, a language would employ a similar morphosyntactic device. Old Persian used EPC to encode indirect participation, and PCP construction is an instance of it which is used today in Modern Persian.

Copyright© Ghazaleh Kazeminejad 2014