• Corpus ID: 51931352

Two kinds of “possessor raising” in Choctaw*

@inproceedings{Tyler2018TwoKO,
  title={Two kinds of “possessor raising” in Choctaw*},
  author={Matthew Tyler},
  year={2018}
}

• M. Tyler
• Published 2018
• Linguistics

Choctaw has been described as having possessor raising of subjects, where a noun phrase which would typically be the possessor of the subject itself functions as the subject. I show that Choctaw possessor raising actually comes in two types, conflated in previous work. In one type — true possessor raising— the possessor raises out of the possessee, which sits in the subject position. In another type — thematic external possession— the possessor is base-generated as an applicative argument, and is related to the possessee at semantic interpretation. From these different structures, I derive a range of morphological, semantic and syntactic differences between the two constructions. The paper shows not only that possessor raising/external possession can be derived via two different syntactic mechanisms, but also that those two mechanisms may co-exist in the same language.