Alienability splits in Swedish from a diachronic perspective
The paper discusses possessive expressions with body-part nouns in Swedish (1300–1550) with particular focus on the so-called alienability splits, i.e., separate patterns of marking possession for alienable and inalienable entities. The key problem to be addressed is to what extent such splits ca...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2022
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18570/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18570/1/51762-178356-1-PB.pdf |
| _version_ | 1848814608491479040 |
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| author | Piotrowska, Alicja Skrzypek, Dominika |
| author_facet | Piotrowska, Alicja Skrzypek, Dominika |
| author_sort | Piotrowska, Alicja |
| building | UKM Institutional Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | The paper discusses possessive expressions with body-part nouns in Swedish (1300–1550)
with particular focus on the so-called alienability splits, i.e., separate patterns of marking
possession for alienable and inalienable entities. The key problem to be addressed is to what
extent such splits can be found in Swedish and the aim of the study is to establish when they
arise and what motivates their formation. The inalienable possessive constructions with bodypart
referents in Modern Swedish include the so-called implicit possession, where only the
definite article is used and the inalienable prepositional construction of the type ‘the head on
him’. The analyzed material consists of Old Swedish prosaic texts written between 1300 and
1550. The corpus includes eight texts and amounts to ca. 250,000 words. The material is studied
both quantitatively and qualitatively; collostructional analysis is used for the statistical
overview of the data. The results of the collostructional analysis confirm that the implicit
possessive construction first appears in Period II (1350–1450) and becomes grammaticalized
in the late 1400s. The inalienable prepositional construction is not found in the material studied
and thus must be of later origin. The results suggest further that the inalienable possessive
constructions do not arise as a result of the speaker’s wish to disambiguate the notion of
inalienability but are a by-product of other diachronic processes, such as the
grammaticalization of the definite article in the indirect anaphoric context. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-15T00:36:47Z |
| format | Article |
| id | oai:generic.eprints.org:18570 |
| institution | Universiti Kebangasaan Malaysia |
| institution_category | Local University |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-15T00:36:47Z |
| publishDate | 2022 |
| publisher | Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | oai:generic.eprints.org:185702022-05-11T07:08:26Z http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18570/ Alienability splits in Swedish from a diachronic perspective Piotrowska, Alicja Skrzypek, Dominika The paper discusses possessive expressions with body-part nouns in Swedish (1300–1550) with particular focus on the so-called alienability splits, i.e., separate patterns of marking possession for alienable and inalienable entities. The key problem to be addressed is to what extent such splits can be found in Swedish and the aim of the study is to establish when they arise and what motivates their formation. The inalienable possessive constructions with bodypart referents in Modern Swedish include the so-called implicit possession, where only the definite article is used and the inalienable prepositional construction of the type ‘the head on him’. The analyzed material consists of Old Swedish prosaic texts written between 1300 and 1550. The corpus includes eight texts and amounts to ca. 250,000 words. The material is studied both quantitatively and qualitatively; collostructional analysis is used for the statistical overview of the data. The results of the collostructional analysis confirm that the implicit possessive construction first appears in Period II (1350–1450) and becomes grammaticalized in the late 1400s. The inalienable prepositional construction is not found in the material studied and thus must be of later origin. The results suggest further that the inalienable possessive constructions do not arise as a result of the speaker’s wish to disambiguate the notion of inalienability but are a by-product of other diachronic processes, such as the grammaticalization of the definite article in the indirect anaphoric context. Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2022-02 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18570/1/51762-178356-1-PB.pdf Piotrowska, Alicja and Skrzypek, Dominika (2022) Alienability splits in Swedish from a diachronic perspective. GEMA ; Online Journal of Language Studies, 22 (1). pp. 57-79. ISSN 1675-8021 https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1467 |
| spellingShingle | Piotrowska, Alicja Skrzypek, Dominika Alienability splits in Swedish from a diachronic perspective |
| title | Alienability splits in Swedish from a diachronic perspective |
| title_full | Alienability splits in Swedish from a diachronic perspective |
| title_fullStr | Alienability splits in Swedish from a diachronic perspective |
| title_full_unstemmed | Alienability splits in Swedish from a diachronic perspective |
| title_short | Alienability splits in Swedish from a diachronic perspective |
| title_sort | alienability splits in swedish from a diachronic perspective |
| url | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18570/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18570/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18570/1/51762-178356-1-PB.pdf |