Wednesday 20 June 2018

Possession As A Circumstantial Relation [Language Typology]

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 297):
In principle, possession can be thought of as another kind of circumstantial relation, which could be embodied in some such expression as ‘at Peter is a piano’, ‘the piano is with  Peter’. Many languages [e.g.Irish] typically indicate possession by circumstantials of this kind. The nearest English is the verb belong; compare the dialectal form is along o’me.