Gradualness in contact-induced constructional replication: The abstract possession construction in...

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Gradualness in contact-induced constructional replication

The Abstract Possession construction in the Circum-Mediterranean area*

Chiara Fedriani1, Gianguido Manzelli2 & Paolo Ramat3

1University of Bergamo / 2University of Pavia / 3IUSS Pavia

It is widely appreciated that the linguistic category of possession does not reduce to any single, familiar value, such as ownership. A moment’s thought reveals the extraordinary variety of the relationships coded by possessive constructions. (Langacker 1991: 169)

In this paper we investigate the emergence, the diachronic spread and the resulting areal distribution of the so-called Abstract Possession construction in the Circum-Mediterranean area. In this construction, grammatical means typically used to convey concrete possession are recruited to express feelings and other abstract states. We explore the dynamics through which this construal gradually extended both in space and time with reference to a well-defined grammaticalization area (Kuteva 2000). We take into account cases of contact-induced grammatical replication and we show that different degrees of grammaticalization correlate with geographical factors. We also address some issues pertaining to the field of lexical typology and explore the privileged semantic paths along which the construction was extended in different languages. Finally, on the basis of our data we provide some insights into the functional characterization of the domain of abstract possession.

* This paper is a product of the PRIN project Contact and Change in the History of Mediter-ranean Languages coordinated by Marco Mancini. More specifically, the authors work within the Research Unit at the University of Bergamo, whose coordinator is Piera Molinelli (PRIN 2008, prot. EHLWYE, sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research, MIUR). This contribution is the result of fruitful discussions between the authors. Chiara Fedriani wrote Sections 2 and 5, Gianguido Manzelli is the author of Sections 3 and 4, and Paolo Ramat is responsible of Sections 1 and 6.


Chiara Fedriani, Gianguido Manzelli & Paolo Ramat

1. Introduction: The Abstract Possession construction

The aim of this paper is to provide further insights into the theoretical issue of gradu-alness in the grammaticalization of contact-induced constructional transfers and to compare them with instances of language-specific and autonomous parallelisms that, in contrast, may be motivated in terms of presumably universal cognitive mechanisms. Drawing on a survey on Experiential constructions in the Circum-Mediterranean (CM) area,1 which we have discussed in detail elsewhere (Fedriani, Manzelli & Ramat 2011; see further Manzelli, Ramat & Roma 2002), we will restrict ourselves to the Abstract Possession (henceforth: AP) construction (such as Lat. fortunam habēre ‘to be lucky’, lit. ‘to have luck’), which sheds considerable light on the topic.

The process of grammaticalization whereby a verb denoting grasping, seizing and possession is exploited as a “support verb”, i.e. a polysemic item that undergoes seman-tic and grammatical bleaching and extension, is far from being rare in the world’s languages (see, e.g. Givón 1984: 103; Sweetser 1990: 20ff.; Heine 1997: 47ff.; Heine & Kuteva 2002). In this paper we will focus on the AP construction found in many CM languages, where the expression of feelings of the type “to be thirsty”, “to be sleepy” etc. are characterized by the use of “have”. In this construction, lexical and structural means usually exploited to express concrete possession are used to denote feelings and other abstract states such as “being right, wrong”, and even age as in French j’ai trente ans ‘I am thirty years old’. As Lazard (2005: 153) notes, “[t]he common feature of those notions, which may be subsumed under the name of experience in a broad sense, is that they all entirely or partly escape the volition and action of the referent”. These semantic determinants are presumably universal: we do not know of any language that is incapable of expressing elementary notions such as “I am hungry, sleepy, thirsty” and the like” (cf. also Wierzbicka 1996).

Note that a strong semantic link holding between Possessors and Experiencers is attested world-wide (see Creissels 1996; Bhaskararao & Subbarao 2004: xi; Næss 2007:

1. Given the phraseological nature of our research, which along the lines of an onomasio-logical approach started not from lexemes but from concepts, recourse to a defined corpus seemed to be rather pointless. Moreover, not all the languages under scrutiny, namely Albanian, Bulgarian, Egyptian Arabic, French, Italian, Macedonian, Maltese, Modern Greek, Moroccan Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish, have satisfactory corpora; accordingly, we have tried to avoid the risk of an unbalanced data collection with overestima-tion of languages such as French or Italian that do have very large linguistic corpora. Therefore, our investigation is primarily based on reference grammars and dictionaries. However, we have also checked whether nowadays native speakers of the Circum- Mediterranean languages in fact use the constructions found in reference works, by administering them a questionnaire designed to elicit any potentially competing strategy in the expression of Abstract Possession. Quoting them all would by far exceed the space at our disposal.



Chapter 6; Stolz et al. 2008: 108; Stassen 2009; see especially Lichtenberk 1985: 105 on some Oceanic languages, Verma & Mohanan 1991 and Shibatani & Pardeshi 1999 on South Asian languages, Heine 1997: 36 and 106 on some Niger-Congo languages, Bickel 1997 on Belhare and Bickel 2004 on Tibeto-Burman languages, Bossong 1998 and Haspelmath 2001 on European languages, Evans 2004 on Iwaidjan languages spo-ken in Australia, Ganenkov 2006 on Nakh-Daghestanian). This link is not necessarily expressed via a verb of possession, such as “to have”, “to own”; other constructions like “to be with x” or “to me is x” are also cross-linguistically frequent in expressing feelings and other abstract uncontrolled states (see e.g. Seiler 1983: 56–58 and Heine 1997: 203). In this light, the AP construction can be seen as a metaphorical extension – although fully grammaticalized – of the prototypical possessive construction, which has an ani-mate Possessor, a Predicate and a (± animate) Possessee, as in Edward has/owns a car/a dog. Therefore, we can maintain that the motivation behind the emergence of the AP structure rests on presumably universal mechanisms of human cognitive behav-ior: concrete possession is a fundamental component of everyday life and constitutes a basic scenario, a bio-cultural domain (cf. Seiler 1983: 11) which can be metaphori-cally extended to neighboring semantic domains. As Croft (2001: 129ff.) notes, the use of possessive constructions to express feelings and other abstract states can be inter-preted as the manifestation of the multidimensional character of the human concep-tualization of experience, which allows for novel and alternative construals expressing one and the same semantic structure:

The novel reconstrual of semantic structure is expressed by the use of a nonconventional syntactic structure for that experience (such as the earliest uses of avoir for bodily states). (…) Extension of constructions to new uses is a change in the distribution of that construction, and such changes are theorized to follow connected paths in conceptual space. For example, the predication of bodily states would be situated between the predication of inherent properties [I AM COLD] and the predication of possession [I HAVE COLD], thereby representing its conceptually intermediate and conceptually ambivalent status.

This is the reason why verbs denoting possession can be exploited to convey complex and abstract notions, such as hunger, fever or sleep. This is what we constantly do: as Lakoff & Johnson (1980: 59) put it, “We typically conceptualize the nonphysical in terms of the physical – that is, we conceptualize the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated”, and this process allows us to categorize abstract states such as feelings as if they were concrete objects that we can grasp, seize, hold, manipulate, and get rid of. This happens because, as Lakoff & Johnson further remark (1980: 25), “[w]hen things are not clearly discrete or bounded, we still categorize them as such. […] Our experience with physical objects (especially our own bodies) provides the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is, ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc. as entities and substances”. We then



conceptualize feelings as things being possessed. As is known, the human body rep-resents the basic point of reference for our representation of the world and, conse-quently, the starting point for the metaphorical mapping of feelings, which, as we will see, can easily be accommodated within the basic frame of possession.

This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 deals with the Latin situation that con-stitutes the point of departure for Romance (and other) languages. Section 3 examines the synchronic scenario in the CM area. In Sections 4 and 5 we have considered the spread of the AP construction both in space and time with special attention devoted to (i) the issue of gradualness in contact-induced extensions, comparing the varying degrees to which the AP construction grammaticalized in different CM languages (Section 4) and (ii) the question as to what feelings each language encodes first with the possessive construction, thus tackling typical matters pertaining to lexical typology (Section 5). The final section summarizes the results and presents our conclusions.

. The Latin situation: A synchronic and diachronic overview

The use of the AP construction is already attested in Latin. Consider the following example, where the Experiencer (hic) is expressed as the Possessor (habet) of the Stimulus (febrim):2

(1) Si cui venae sic moventur hic if one.dat veins.nom.pl so move.prs.pass.3pl this.nom habet febrim have.prs.3sg fever.acc ‘If veins move in this way to somebody, he has a fever’ (Cic. Fat. 8.15)

This construal ties in inherently with the typical tendency of relating an animate participant with the syntactic function of subject. Moreover, the habēre pattern models the possessive situation by fitting it into the syntax of two-participant events that work on the basis of subject = Nominative and object = Accusative and conforms to the general Action Schema as defined by Heine (1997: 47). Crucially, the transitive pattern is the most ordinary and productive in Latin and this is why this basic schema came to cover other, different types of two-participant situations, like possessive ones.

. In the interlinear glosses, the following abbreviations are used: abl = ablative; acc = accusative; adj = adjective; aor = aorist; dat = dative; f = feminine; fut = future; gen = geni-tive; impf = imperfect; loc = locative; nom = nominative; pass = passive; pf = perfect; ppf = pluperfect; pl = plural, prs = present; ptc = participle; sg = singular; subj = subjunctive.



From a theoretical perspective, the extension of the possessive construction to express feelings is an illustration of how an argument structure can broaden its func-tional characterization beyond its semantic prototype to other, less central meanings. This observation relates directly to the prototype-based view of constructions taken by Tomasello (1998: xviii), who neatly illustrates the high level of generalization attached to the transitive construction in English: “in English, the basic transitive construction has as its prototype utterances such as He broke the vase in which an animate actor does something to cause a change of state in an undergoer (Hopper & Thompson 1980). But the construction over historical time has been extended to other, less proto-typical situations in which the “force dynamics” are not so clear or are only metaphori-cal, as in, for example, John entered the room and The car costs $400”.

In the case of the AP construction, the transitive schema with the verb habēre is even exploited to convey a conceptual scenario where the participant expressed as sub-ject is non-volitional and non-instigator, the state escapes his or her control, and the possessee is abstract. In fact, the abstract type under scrutiny represents in itself the most peripheral domain of possessivity, according to Stassen (2009: 20), who sees the functional core of possession as constituted by alienable possession. Then there are two less typical, but related, subdomains, namely inalienable possession and tem-porary possession, which are still close to the core of this functional domain. These observations are in keeping with a similar hierarchy suggested by Heine (1997: 109):

alienable and concrete > inalienable concrete/abstract > abstract.

In Early Latin the possessive construction with the verb habēre was used to express both prototypical possession (i.e. alienable and concrete) and inalienable possession, e.g. possession of body parts and of the kinship-type, as Examples (2) to (4) illustrate, respectively:

(2) Hic habet vidulum this.nom.sg have.prs.3sg wallet.acc.sg ‘this person has your wallet’ (Plaut. Rud. 1357)

(3) Pumiceos oculos habeo of.pumice.stone.acc.pl eye.acc.pl have.prs.1sg ‘I’ve eyes of pumice stone (i.e. dry)’ (Plaut. Ps. 75)

(4) Quam fortunatus ceteris sum rebus (…) how happy.nom.sg other.abl.pl be.prs.1sg thing.abl.pl hanc matrem habens talem, this.acc.sg mother.acc.sg have.ptc.prs.nom.sg such.acc.sg illam autem uxorem! that.acc.sg and wife.acc.sg ‘How happy am I in other respects, in having such a good mother, and

her for my wife!’ (Ter. Hec. 677)



Note, however, that abstract possession, i.e. the most peripheral domain, was preferably expressed by means of the old Indo-European Dative-possessive alternative option at an early stage in the history of Latin. This alternative construction is exemplified by (5).

(5) Si ei forte fuisset febris if 3sg.dat by chance be.subj.ppf.3sg fever.nom.sg ‘If by chance he has had a fever’ (Plaut. Mil. 720)

Subsequently, the habēre construction took over the expression of the AP, thus gradu-ally supplanting the competing mihi est construction. Examples that show an alterna-tion between the Dative possession and the habēre construction, preferred by a later author like Seneca, in order to express the very same Stimulus, are the following:

(6) Credam, pudor si quoiquam believe.fut.1sg shame.nom.sg if any.dat.sg lenoni siet pimp.dat.sg be.subj.prs.3sg ‘I will believe it, if any pimp is ashamed (lit. has shame)’ (Plaut. Curc. 58)

(7) Si pudorem haberes, ultimam if shame.acc.sg have.subj.impf.2sg last.acc.sg mihi pensionem remississes 1sg.dat payment.acc.sg send back.subj.ppf.2sg ‘If you were ashamed (lit.: had shame), you would send me back

the last payment’ (Sen. Ben. 29.10)

These data point to a process of diachronic constructional substitution: the AP con-struction featuring the verb habēre is widely attested from Classical Latin onward, while in earlier periods the Dative-possessive option was preferred. This trend is in line with Baldi and Nuti’s study on the relationship between the habeo and the mihi est strategies in the domain of experience: their data show that

in spite of the higher frequency of habeo x [in Early Latin], in Plautus we counted only seven occurrences where the subject of the verb is a human participant that can somehow be related to the semantic role of experiencer. This contrasts with 35 examples of this kind with mihi est x. Such an inversion of the ratio suggests that the expression of an experiencer relation, although not inconsistent with habeo, is a minor function of this verb and is a primary function of the dative construction in an early author like Plautus. (Baldi & Nuti 2010: 260–261)

As we will see in Section 3 below, the use of the verb habēre to express abstract posses-sion paved the way for further developments in the Romance languages, where nowa-days it constitutes the common strategy (on the increase of habēre over the Dative possession construction in Latin and other IE languages, see also Löfstedt 1963;



Benveniste 1966 [1960]; see especially Magni 1999: 45–49 for a detailed survey of the functions of the mihi est type and its typical fillers as well as Baldi & Cuzzolin 2005 on the history of different verbs for “have” in Indo-European from an areal and typologi-cal perspective). For instance, in Romance languages there is no verb corresponding to the Latin lexeme ēsuriō or to Mod. Greek peinṓ “I am hungry”, but one has to use the periphrastic, grammaticalized form featuring the verb for have plus an abstract feeling as possessee.

In this paper we will also compare the diachronic development of the Abstract Possession construction with a neighboring pattern that dates back to Latin as well, namely that featuring the verb venīre “to come” which underlines the ingressive character of entering a physiological state:

(8) Hinc canibus blandis rabies venit hence dog.dat.pl fawn.dat.pl madness.nom.sg come.prs.3sg ‘Hence on the fawn dog comes madness’ (Verg. Georg. 3.496)

(9) Post longam sitim et vigiliam, after prolonged.acc.sg thirst.acc.sg and wakefulness.acc.sg post multam satietatem post infractum after much.acc.sg satiety.acc.sg after break.ptc.pf.acc.sg calorem, plenus somnus venit warmth.acc.sg full.nom.sg sleep.nom.sg come.prs.3sg ‘after prolonged thirst and wakefulness, after full sating with water, after

making a break in the heat, there comes abundant sleep’ (Cels. Med. 3.7)

(10) Metus cum venit, rarum habet fear.nom.sg when come.prs.3sg scant.acc.sg have.prs.3sg somnus locum sleep.nom.sg room.acc.sg ‘when fear comes (to one), sleep has scanty room’ (Pub. Syr. Sent. M.10)

An especially interesting aspect in the context of our discussion is that of comparing the contact-induced gradual diffusion of the Abstract Possession construction with cases of language-specific and autonomous parallelisms that, in contrast, seems to be motivated in terms of presumably universal cognitive mechanisms. As we will see, a case in point is provided by the inchoative pattern just discussed. In the remainder of this paper we therefore seek to explore how general cognitive principles and historical, cultural and geographical factors interacted in the diachronic and areal distribution of both of these constructions. More specifically, we will identify and discuss cases of constructional changes in the functional domain of AP and their distribution in the CM area, distinguishing between contact-induced constructional replication, clearly due to historically definable factors, and structures which may have independently



emerged in different languages on the basis of universal cognitive or communicative mechanisms. In line with Heine & Kuteva (2005: 122), we do not take these factors as mutually exclusive alternatives, and argue rather that they are likely to interact while they trigger and constrain instances of language change both in space and in time.

. Possessing feelings in the Circum-Mediterranean area: A synchronic and diachronic overview

As we have already said, the AP construction is typically found in Romance languages such as Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish and, to some extent, Portuguese. Consider the following examples from Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, and Neapolitan, which employ the verbs avere, avoir, tener, tenir and tenere “to have”, respectively, to express different bodily feelings:

(11) It. ho fame, sete, caldo, freddo, sonno Fr. j’ai faim, soif, chaud, froid, sommeil Sp. tengo hambre, sed, calor, frio, sueño Cat. tinc gana, set, calor, fred, son Neap. tengo famma, sete, cavero, friddo, suonno have.1sg hunger thirst hot/heat cold sleep ‘I am hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, sleepy’ (lit. ‘I have hunger, thirst,

heat, cold, sleep’)

Interestingly, in non-Romance Albanian (Example 12) and Maltese (see below, Example 15) we find the same construction:

(12) kam uri, etje, të nxehtë, të ftohtë, gjumë have.1sg hunger thirst the heat the cold sleep ‘I am hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, sleepy’ (lit. ‘I have hunger, thirst, heat,

cold, sleep’)

Also Greek (Example 13), Macedonian and Bulgarian (Example 14) occasionally adopt the same syntactic strategy, namely the “have”-strategy, to express feelings, while Maltese (Example 15) and Turkish (Example 16) use the functionally equivalent possessive “be”-strategy (see Footnote 3 for a discussion):

(13) ékhō puretó have.1sg temperature ‘I have a temperature’

(14) imam temperatura have.1sg temperature ‘I have a temperature’



(15) għand-i l-ġuħ, l-għatx, s-sħana, l-bard, n-ngħas to.me-1sg the-hunger the-thirst the-heat the-cold the-sleep ‘I am hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, sleepy’ (lit. ‘I have the hunger, the thirst,

the heat, the cold, the sleep’)

(16) ateş-im var fever-my existent ‘I have a temperature’

Although the use of lexical verbs meaning “have” seems to be typical for encoding alien-able possession in Indo-European (cf. Stassen 2009: 64ff.), according to data collected from grammars and dictionaries such verbs seem to be fairly infrequently used to denote abstract possession outside the Romance branch and among other CM languages.3

Drawing on Heine & Kuteva (2005), we have identified the following parameters to argue for contact-induced changes:

1. cross-linguistic infrequency of the construction at issue;2. intense historical contacts;3. non-genetic relationship;4. loss of competing strategies.

Given that these parameters apply to the history of the AP construction, we have interpreted cases such as those exemplified in (12) to (14) as instances of contact-induced replication. Maltese and Turkish constructions such as those illustrated by Examples (15) and (16), for instance, have probably developed under the influence of external models (not only for physical feelings but also for more abstract notions such as “to be in a hurry”, “to be right”, as we will see in sect. 4: see e.g. Turkish acelem var, hakkim var) but make use of their own morphosyntactic means.

More specifically, cross-linguistic infrequency of a given construction seems to play a key role in determining cases of contact-induced replication:

[It] is fairly easy to discover cases of replica grammaticalization when the model language has developed a grammatical category by using a conceptual source that is rarely encountered cross-linguistically and where exactly the same source is used by speakers of the replica language. (Heine & Kuteva 2005: 93)

. Note that Maltese and Turkish do not have a proper lexical verb meaning “to have”, but adopt instead different strategies to express both concrete and abstract possession. Maltese uses a preposition għand which means ‘at’ or ‘to’. A sentence like għand-i ktieb (lit. at-me book) ‘I have a book’ resembles a locative construction: cf. il-ktieb għandi “the book is at my place” (see Comrie 1982: 288). In Turkish, we have two adjectives var, yok meaning, respectively, ‘existent’ and ‘non-existent’. In the words of Lewis (2000: 145): “They take the place of English ‘there is/are’ and ‘there is/are not’ and of the verb ‘to have’ […] The subject of English ‘have’ is put in the genitive in Turkish: çocuğun babası var ‘the child has a father’ […] benim şüphem yok ‘I have no doubt’” (see further Kornfilt 1997: 185).



The AP construction is a case in point. As Manzelli, Ramat & Roma (2002: 227) have remarked, “while the have-pattern for Core Possession is widespread in Europe, the have-pattern for Abstract Possession seems to be typical in Romance languages and thus may be considered a feature which characterizes a Southern area” (on the areal distribution of the AP strategy in Europe, see also Dahl 1995: 19f.; Heine 1997: 50; Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Wälchli 2001, §7.2).

Moreover, the languages under consideration are known to have had a history of prolonged and intense contact. As is known, linguistic contact is the typical situation in the history of the CM area, and, particularly, the case of the southern Balkan lan-guages and Turkish under Italian (Venetian) influence and of Maltese, strongly influ-enced by (Sicilian) Italian. Note that the languages under scrutiny belong to different subbranches of Indo-European, as in the case of non-Romance Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian and Macedonian, or pertain to different linguistic families (Semitic, as in the case of Maltese; Turkic, as in the case of Turkish). This point is worthy of special attention and is acknowledged in the following quote by Heine (2009: 39):

If two neighboring, genetically unrelated (or only remotely related) languages share a grammatical category that is cross-linguistically highly unusual, then there is some probability that this commonality is due to language contact.

Lastly, the present account explains why other competing strategies that were available in synchrony or at earlier stages have fallen into disuse and have been replaced by the new emergent construction. Such substitutions hint at a process of language change, whereby the older strategy can be rapidly lost or at least for some time coexist with the new one. An example is the history of the Ancient Greek verb puréssō ‘I am feverish, I fall ill of a fever’ attested as early as in Euripides (5th c. BCE: Cyclops, 228), that has been supplanted by the emergence of the competing AP strategy ékhō puretó ‘I have a fever’ which prevails later as a result of language contact.4 Note that such processes of constructional substitution are far from being straightforwardly definable. Different verbs have different stories: as far as we are concerned with the expression of hunger and thirst in Modern Greek, we still have to register the coexistence of two competing

. To be more precise, ékhō is never used to express AP either in Byzantine Greek, as reported by Sophocles (1914: 550–551), or in later times, since Kriarás’ dictionary, which covers the chronological span from 1100 to 1669, does not report this use (Kriarás 1978: 382–383). Interestingly, the first occurrence of the AP construction dates back to Marínos Phaliéros, who lived in the first half of the 16th century in Crete but had Venetian origins and was, argu-ably, bilingual. Marínos Phaliéros used the construction ékhō ádikon ‘I am wrong’ (lit. ‘I have wrong’) in his poem Historía kaì óneiron (v. 471; Kriarás 1969: 97) and this could be taken as a relevant piece of evidence for the influence exerted by Venetian on the contact-induced development of the AP construction in Greek.


Gradualness in contact-induced constructional replication 1

strategies, namely older lexical verbs on the one hand (peinṓ ‘I am hungry’, dipsṓ ‘I am thirsty’) and the AP construction with the support verb ékhō ‘I have’ (ékhō peína, ékhō dípsa, lit. ‘I have hunger, thirst’). In Italian and other Romance languages, by contrast, the AP construction prevailed and old synthetic verbs such as Latin ēsuriō and sitiō totally disappeared.

To sum up, the Latin AP construction was originally restricted to a limited set of situations and later extended in space (especially in Greek, Albanian, Maltese) and time (Romance languages). This argument shows that the Italo-Romance pattern, especially through its Venetian and Sicilian varieties, acted as a model structure in a process of constructional extension within a circumscribed grammaticalization area (in the sense of Kuteva 2000).

Let us now briefly turn to the diachronic and areal spread of the inchoative con-struction with the verb ‘to come’. As we have seen in the Latin examples given as (8) to (10), in this construction feelings are conceptualized as movements across space. This cognitively basic configuration is cross-linguistically widely attested and is present also in a number of unrelated CM languages, as shown in Examples (17) to (21) below:

(17) Italian mi è venuta fame, sete… I.dat be.3sg come.pp.f hunger, thirst lit. ‘hunger, thirst have come to me’

(18) Albanian më vjen gjumë I.dat come.3sg sleep lit. ‘sleep comes to me’

(19) Turkish uyku-m gel-di sleep-poss.1sg has-come lit. ‘my sleep has come’

(20) Tunisian Arabic ana žāy-nī en-nūm I (it-)came-to-me the-sleep lit. ‘I, the sleep came to me’

(21) Moroccan Arabic žani ž-žu lǝ-‘teš, l-berd, n–n‘ās has-come-to-me the-hunger the-thirst the-cold the-sleep lit. ‘hunger, thirst, cold, sleep have come to me’

We may consider this metaphorical construction-type based on the verb “to come” as a language-specific strategy that arose independently in different languages to solve the problem of encoding some physically basic, but conceptually more complex states



of affair (SoAs), namely inchoative processes. Evidence for this comes from the fact that this motion schema is common cross-linguistically. Moreover, children learn-ing typologically different languages get this type of construction fairly early as well (Özçalışkan 2007).5

These strategies may show some common features, like the motion schema just discussed, because, after all, from the cognitive point of view the human inventory of linguistic strategies is a finite set. As Goldberg (1995: 39) puts it:

in order to express invisible scenes, languages are expected to draw on a finite set of possible event types [our emphasis], such as that of someone causing something, someone experiencing something, something moving, something being in a state, someone possessing something, something causing a change of state or location. (…) These event types are quite abstract. We do not expect to find distinct basic sentence types which have as their basic senses semantics such as something turning a color, someone becoming upset, someone oversleeping.

Interestingly, the same observations also hold when we look at another basic expres-sion such as “I am X years old”. More specifically, the CM languages make use of a very limited range of strategies, namely the “be” or “have” strategy, where the category of age is treated as a possessee (cf. Stolz et al. 2008: 29 for some data and a comparison between Italian, Icelandic and Hungarian). It is important to note in this context that the use of the verb “to have” to express one’s age is once again a typical feature of Romance languages, as exemplified in (22):

(22) Pg. tenho trinta anos Sp. tengo treinta años Cat. tinc trenta anys Fr. j’ai trente ans

. Of course, one cannot exclude that the “come” construction also spread out along the same paths as the “have” construction (“lexical diffusion”). However, the diffusion of the former construct even outside the CM area (cf. Özçalışkan 2005) makes it probable that we are faced with a real cognitively basic configuration. Further evidence can be gleaned from Breton, that exhibits an alternation between the stative AP construction and the inchoative counterpart with the verb “to come” as examples (i) and (ii) illustrate (from Kervella 2001: 29, 58, respectively). While the Breton AP construction could be interpreted as a case of contact-induced replication triggered by the strong influence of French, the inchoative structure is to be understood as an autonomous and language-specific evolution, given that it is not attested in French.

(i) naon am eus hunger have.1sg (historically, ‘hunger to me it is’) ‘j’ai faim’

(ii) naon zo deuet din hunger be.3sg come.ptc.past to-me ‘je commence à avoir faim’.



It. ho trent’ anni have.1sg 30 year.pl Rom. am treizeci de ani have.1sg 30 of year.pl ‘I am thirty years old’

The use of habēre for expressing one’s age dates back as early as Classical Latin: clas-sical writers such as Cicero (Example 25) and later ones (Examples 26–27) make use of it. On the other hand, in Early Latin authors such as Cato, Plautus and Terentius never use habēre, but other alternative constructions instead (see Examples 23–24). This process of constructional substitution clearly demonstrates that the use of habēre to express age is an innovation.

(23) ubi aetas accessit ad annos XXXVI when age.nom.sg reach.pf.3sg to year.acc.pl thirty-six ‘when you reached the age of thirty-six’ (Cato Agr. 3.1)

(24) annos sexaginta natus es aut plus years.acc.pl sixty be.born.pf.2sg or more ‘you are sixty years of age or more’ (Ter. Heaut. 62)

(25) quattuor et triginta tum habebat annos four and thirty then have.impf.3sg year.acc.pl ‘he was thirty-four years of age’ (Cic. Br. 161)

(26) cum haberet annos duodeviginti conj have.subj.impf.3sg year.acc.pl eighteen ‘at the age of eighteen’ (Quint. Inst. 8.5.17)

(27) quae non plus quam septem annos rel.f.sg not more than seven year.acc.pl habere videbatur have.inf.prs seem.impf.3sg ‘who did not appear to be more than seven years old’ (Petr. Sat. 4.25)

This shows once again that already in Classical Latin the transitive construction with habēre predominated over competing strategies. In conclusion, also with regard to the expression of age our findings corroborate the already mentioned tendency explained by Baldi and Nuti (2010: 254):

Habeo becomes the basic means of expressing possession by the Classical period, as is shown by the data from Caesar and Cicero. Generally speaking, in Latin the most frequently used possessive construction is habeo x. The predominance of this construction becomes overwhelming in late authors such as Seneca (epistulae ad Lucilium) and Petronius, and in Late Latin the occurrence of mihi est is mainly limited to fixed expressions (as in the Itinerarium Egeriae), or it may be the result of stylistic (intentional) archaism.



This typically Romance pattern contrasts with other strategies employed in Europe, such as the copular pattern, found in all Germanic languages, in Finnish, Estonian and also in Bulgarian. Syntactic variations are possible, such as nominal sentences in Classical Arabic which use a noun endowed with a possessive suffix:

(28) ‘umrī talatūna sana(tan) age.poss.1sg thirty year(acc) ‘I am thirty years old’

Other languages, such as Albanian (29) and Hungarian (30), make use of an adjectival form, while in Latvian (31) we find a copular construction expressing the animate participant in the dative case. Note that this structure is very common in Europe: it is also employed in Lithuanian and in a number of Slavic languages (such as Belorussian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Czech).

(29) Albanian jam tridhjetё vjeç be.1sg thirty yearish ‘I am thirty years old’

(30) Hungarian harminc éves vagyok thirty yearish be.1sg ‘I am thirty years old’

(31) Latvian man ir trīsdesmit gadu I.dat be.3sg thirty year.gen.pl ‘I am thirty years old’

However, these constructs too go back to the two strategies mentioned above. This is even the case of the apparently very different structure in Turkish, where the final (y)Im is the mark of the first person in nominal phrases (cf. gazeteci-yim ‘I am a journalist’, lit. journalist-1SG):

(32) otuz yaşındayım yaş -ı -n- da -yım thirty age-poss.3-pronominal -n-loc -be.1sg ‘I am thirty years old’, lit. ‘in its [of thirty] age I-am’

Nevertheless, inside the cognitive templates referred to by Goldberg we can see the synchronic coexistence of different strategies (see the already mentioned alternation in Greek: peinṓ along with ékhō peína). Different tenses and aspects may be expressed by different morphosyntactic or lexical means. In Italian, for instance, the motion schema in the perfective aspect mi è venuta fame (lit. ‘hunger has come to me’) focuses on the resulting SoA, whereas the same structure in the progressive, mi sta venendo



fame (lit. ‘hunger is coming to me’) refers to the inchoative moment of the SoA which is expressed instead by the stative ho fame (lit. ‘I have hunger’). Moreover, there are emphatic strategies such as sono affamato ‘I am hungry’ which underline the subjectiv-ity of the same experience. Greek uses the verb piánō ‘catch, seize’ instead of “come” (Mackridge 1985: 358–359) and expresses the same aspectual variations as Italian (Mackridge 1985: 242):

(33) a. m’ épiase to kepháli mou I.acc caught the head poss.1sg ‘I’ve got a headache’ b. arkhízō kai peináō begin.1sg and be.hungry.1sg ‘I’m beginning to get hungry’, inchoative c. ēkhō peinásei have.1sg got.hungry ‘I have become hungry’, perfective d. eímai peinasménos be.1sg be.hungry.ptc.aor ‘I am hungry’, stative

These multiple competing strategies found even within one and the same language support the claim made by Croft (2007: 27) that “events involving a human being which are not the result of the human’s intention are verbalized much more variably, that is, are much lower in codability”.6

The survey presented in this section has hopefully shown that historically defin-able cases of contact-induced constructional replication, on the one hand, and language-specific strategies independently emerged in different languages, on the other, coexist and compete in the organization of a restricted semantic domain as that of bodily feelings within a circumscribed area. In the next section we take a closer look at the micro-dynamics with which the AP construction gradually spread in different CM languages. In Section 5 we turn to a comparative analysis and investigate the type of semantic extension through which the AP construction progressively came to cover

. Consider also (colloquial) Italian ho famissima along with French j’ai très faim, lit. ‘I have very hunger’. One might wonder whether fame and faim are nouns or adjectives, as they can morphologically behave like adjectives (cf. j’ai très chaudadj and cald-issimoadj). (We thank J.C. Smith for having drawn our attention to this problem.) It seems that the adjectival behavior of fame and faim is calqued on real adjectival forms such as chaud and caldo, which, in their turn, when entering the AP construction j’ai chaud and ho caldo, respectively, have to be considered as nouns and not as adjectives (see further Pustet forthc.). We are here in a fuzzy area between ADJs and Ns. Speakers make use of this morphological freedom or ambiguity to stress their deep involvement.



the expression of different feelings in the CM area. We will discover some privileged lexical pathways along which the construction at issue gradually expanded by means of contact-induced changes.

. Gradualness in contact-induced extension

The relevant literature has firmly established that replicated constructions are gen-erally less grammaticalized in the borrowing than in the model language (see e.g. Heine & Kuteva 2005; see Harris & Campbell 1995: Chapter 6 for discussion). We have therefore checked whether this claim also holds for the case under scrutiny, i.e. whether in Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and even Maltese and Turkish the periphrastic construction is used optionally, less frequently, and in fewer contexts or if, conversely, the borrowing speakers further exploit this pattern and adapt it to new meanings and new circumstances of use. In addition, we have addressed the question as to whether we can identify intermediate stages of gradual development in contact-induced grammaticalization processes.

In order to evaluate more properly the spread of the AP construction within individual languages and to compare the relative degrees of grammaticalization it underwent, we have broadened the scope of our investigation and taken into account 16 different concepts pertaining to slightly different semantic domains, namely physi-cal feelings (hunger, thirst, heat, cold, sleep), physical pains (temperature, stomach-ache, headache), emotions (fear, worry, restlessness), moral states such as trust, being wrong or right, and other abstract states, like hurry and age. Our findings are sum-marized in Table 1 below, where bold boxes denote AP constructions in the languages under scrutiny.

As one might expect, we have found that in the replica languages the AP construc-tion is less established and grammaticalized than in the model language Italian. A first piece of evidence comes from the fact that in some cases it is used optionally. To quote some examples, as we have seen, in Greek ékhō peína and ékhō dípsa are not obliga-tory choices but alternate with peinṓ and dipsṓ, respectively. The same holds true for the expression of restlessness, which can be either conveyed by the verb ékhō or by a copulative construction. These data contrast with those taken from Italian, where the AP construction is the only structure available to express the same concepts, as Italian lacks synthetic verbs like the Greek ones. As a result, the AP construction is used less frequently in the replica language, also because of competing constructions that might have been present at earlier stages. Lastly, and very importantly, it follows naturally from the remarks above that the AP construction is used in fewer contexts in Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Turkish. While Italian, the model language, uses the AP construction for 15 concepts out of the 16 we have scrutinized, Albanian exploits it



Tabl

e 1.

“Th

e A

P co

nstr

uctio

n in

Ital

ian,

Mal

tese

, Gre

ek, B

ulga

rian,

Mac

edon

ian

and

Turk

ish”

Ital

ian

Mal

tese

A

lban

ian

Gre

ek

Bulg

aria

n M

aced

onia

n Tu

rkis

h

ho fa

me

I.hav

e hu

nger

għ

andi

l-ġu

ħ

I.hav

e

the-

hung

er

kam

uri

I.h

ave

hung

er

ékhō

peí

na

I.hav

e hu

nger

/

peinṓ

I.f

eel h

unge

r

glád

en să

m

hung

ry I.

am

glád

en su

m

hung

ry I.

am

karn

-ım a

ç st

omac

h- m

y

hung

ry (b

e.3sg

)

ho se

te

I.hav

e th

irst

għan

di l-

għat

x

I.hav

e th

e- th

irst

kam

etje

I.h

ave

thirs

ték

hō d

ípsa

I.h

ave

thirs

t / d

ipsṓ

I.f

eel t

hirs

t

žáde

n să

m

thirs

ty I.

am

žéde

n su

m

thirs

ty I.

am

susa

-dı-m

fe

el th

irst-

pa

st- 1

sg

ho ca

ldo

I.h

ave

hot

għan

di s-

sħan

a

I.hav

e th

e-he

at

kam

të n

xeht

ë I.h

ave

the

heat

ze

staín

omai

I.f

eel h

eat

tópl

o m

i e

hotly

to.m

e it.

is m

i e tó

plo

to

.me

it.is

hotly

ısı

n-ıy

or-u

m

war

m u

p-

prs-

1sg

ho fr

eddo

I.h

ave

cold

għ

andi

l-ba

rd

I.hav

e th

e-co

ld

kam

të ft

ohtë

I.h

ave

the

cold

kr

uṓnō

I.f

eel c

old

studé

no m

i e

cold

ly to

.me

it.is

mi e

stúd

eno

to

.me

it.is

cold

ly

üşü-

yor-

um

feel

.col

d-pr

s-1s

g ho

sonn

o

I.hav

e sle

ep

għan

di n

-ngħ

as

I.hav

e th

e-sle

ep

kam

gju

më

I.hav

e sle

ep

nustá

zō

I.fee

l sle

ep

spí m

i se

it.sle

eps t

o.m

e re

fl

mi s

e spí

e to

.me r

efl

it.sle

eps

uyku

-m ge

l-di

sleep

-my

com

e-pa

stho

la fe

bbre

I.h

ave

the

te

mpe

ratu

re

għan

di d

-den

i I.h

ave

the-

feve

r ka

m te

mpe

ratu

rë

I.hav

e te

mpe

ratu

re

ékhō

pur

etó

I.h

ave

feve

r ím

am te

mpe

ratú

ra

I.hav

e te

mpe

ratu

re

Ímam

tem

pera

túra

I.h

ave

tem

pera

ture

at

eş-im

var

fe

ver-

my

exist

ent

ho m

al d

i pan

cia

I.hav

e pa

in o

f st

omac

h

għan

di za

qqi

tuġg

ħani

I.h

ave

st

omac

h-m

y

it. h

urts

.me

kam

dhe

mbj

e ba

rku

I.h

ave

pain

of

.stom

ach

ékhō

pho

úskō

ma

(s

tē k

oiliá

) I.h

ave

infla

tion

(in

-the

stom

ach)

ímam

stom

ášni

bó

lki

I.hav

e ga

stric

pai

ns

ímam

ból

ki

vo st

ómak

ot

I.hav

e pa

ins i

n

stom

ach-

the

karn

-ım a

ğrı-y

or

stom

ach-

my

hu

rt-p

rs

ho m

al d

i tes

ta

I.hav

e pa

in o

f he

ad

għan

di ra

si

tuġg

ħani

I.h

ave

head

-my

it.

hurt

s.me

kam

dhe

mbj

e kok

e I.h

ave p

ain

of.h

ead

ékhō

pon

okép

halo

I.h

ave

pain

-hea

dbo

lí m

e gla

váta

it.

hurt

s me

he

ad-t

he

bóli

me g

láva

ta

it.hu

rts m

e

head

-the

baş-

ım a

ğrı-y

or

head

-my

hurt

.prs

(Con

tinue

d)



Ital

ian

Mal

tese

A

lban

ian

Gre

ek

Bulg

aria

n M

aced

onia

n Tu

rkis

h

ho p

aura

I.h

ave

fear

qi

egħe

d ni

bġa

st

ayin

g I.f

ear

kam

frik

ë I.h

ave

fear

ph

obám

ai

I.fea

r str

axúv

am se

I.f

ear r

efl

se p

láša

m

refl

I.fe

ar

kork

-uyo

r-um

fe

ar-p

res-

1sg

sono

pre

occu

pato

I.a

m w

orrie

d għ

andi

ħaf

na

ħsib

ijiet

I.h

ave

man

y

thou

ghts

jam

i sh

qetë

suar

I.a

m th

e w

orrie

d an

ēsuk

hō

I.wor

ry

razt

revó

žen

săm

w

orrie

d I.a

m

zágr

ižen

sum

w

orrie

d I.a

m

endi

şelen

-iyor

-um

be

anx

ious

-prs

-1sg

ho fr

etta

I.h

ave

hurr

y m

għaġ

ġel

(I.)h

urrie

d nx

itoj

I.has

ten

biáz

omai

I.h

aste

n bă

rzam

I.h

aste

n se

brz

am

refl

I.ha

sten

ac

ele-m

var

ha

ste.m

y ex

isten

tho

ragi

one

I.hav

e rig

ht

għan

di ra

ġun

I.h

ave

right

ka

m të

dre

jtë

I.hav

e th

e rig

hts

ékhō

dík

io

I.hav

e rig

ht

ímam

prá

vo

I.hav

e rig

ht

vo p

ravo

sum

in

righ

t I.a

m

hakk

-ım v

ar

trut

h-m

y ex

isten

t ho

tort

o

I.hav

e w

rong

għ

andi

tort

I.h

ave

wro

ng

e kam

gabi

m

it I.h

ave

wro

ng

ékhō

ádi

ko

I.hav

e w

rong

ne

săm

prá

v

not I

.am

righ

t ne

sum

vo

práv

o

not I

.am

in ri

ght

yanı

l-ıyo

r-um

be

m

istak

en-p

rs-1

sgho

i ne

rvi

I.hav

e ne

rves

so

no n

ervo

so

I.am

ner

vous

għan

di n

-ner

vi

I.hav

e th

e-ne

rves

ja

m n

ervo

z I.a

m n

ervo

us

ékhō

ágk

hos

I.hav

e an

xiet

y /

eím

ai n

eurik

ós

I.am

ner

vous

nérv

en să

m

nerv

ous I

.am

né

rvoz

en su

m

nerv

ous I

.am

sin

ir-ler

-im b

ozuk

ne

rve-

pl-

my

brok

en /

sin

ir-li-

yim

ne

rvou

s-be

.1sg

ho

fidu

cia

I.hav

e tr

ust

għan

di t-

tam

a/

fiduċ

ja

I.hav

e th

e-tr

ust/

tr

ust

kam

bes

im

I.hav

e tr

ust

piste

úō

I.tru

st

ímam

dov

érie

I.h

ave

trus

t ím

am d

óver

ba/

vérb

a

I.hav

e tr

ust/f

aith

inan

-iyor

-um

tr

ust-

prs-

1sg

ho tr

ent'a

nni

I.hav

e 30

yea

rs

għan

di tl

etin

sena

I.h

ave

30 y

ears

jam

trid

hjet

ë vje

ç I a

m 3

0 ye

arish

eí

mai

triá

kont

a

khro

nôn

I.a

m 3

0 ye

ar.g

en.p

l

na tr

ídes

et

godí

ni să

m

of 3

0 ye

ar I.

am

ímam

tríe

set g

ódin

i I.h

ave

30 y

ear.p

l ot

uz y

aşın

dayı

m

in it

s [of

30]

age

I.am

Tabl

e 1.

(C

ontin

ued)



for twelve senses, Greek for eight, Bulgarian and Macedonian for four, and Turkish for only three.7 Maltese deserves a special mention, because it employs the AP construc-tion nearly as frequently as Italian. However, the contexts of use do not perfectly over-lap: interestingly, Italian uses avere to express fear and hurry, whereas Maltese adopts quite different strategies for the corresponding concepts, namely a complex strategy which combines a stative/locative verb and a lexical verb for fear (qiegħed nibġa ‘(lit.) staying I.fear’) and an intransitive, synthetic verb for expressing hurry (mgħaġġel ‘(I.)hurried’). Interestingly, however, Maltese has extended the AP construction to express a new function, namely worry, where not even the model language Italian shows the AP construction. This expansion of the replicated construction to new contexts of use testifies to a very high degree of grammaticalization of the AP construction in Maltese.

The relative frequency of the use of the AP construction in the languages under investigation is graphically illustrated in Figure 1 below.

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

16

14

Italian Maltese Albanian Greek Bulgarian Macedonian Turkish

Figure 1. Contexts of use of the AP construction in some CM languages

On the basis of the frequencies illustrated above, we argue for a continuum of contact-induced replication that correlates with space: the geographically closer the

. Note that in the case of Turkish we may hypothesize a Persian and Arabic influence. Crucially, Persian uses dāštan ‘to have’ in the same contexts: tab dār-am ‘fever have-1SG’, ağele dār-am ‘haste have-1SG’, haqq dār-am ‘truth have-1SG’. It is also worth pointing out that Turkish ateş ‘fever’ is a loan word from Persian āteš ‘fire’; likewise, Turkish acele ‘haste’ comes from Arabic ‘ağala ‘haste’ which also gave rise to Persian ağele. The same pattern of influence was exerted from Arabic ḥaqq both on Turkish hak (hakk-) ‘truth, justice’ and on Persian haqq. In this semantic domain Persian and Arabic exerted a strong lexical and constructional influence on Turkish. This is worthy of note and suggests a multifaceted history of contacts in that area.


1 Chiara Fedriani, Gianguido Manzelli & Paolo Ramat

replica and the model languages, the higher the degree of grammaticalization of the borrowed construction. Our data support this tendency: Maltese, the geographically closest language to Italian, shows as many contexts as those found in the model lan-guage. Next comes Albanian, while Bulgarian, Macedonian and Turkish are progres-sively more peripheral relative to the linguistic center from which the innovation spreads. As a result, the AP construction is only occasionally grammaticalized in these languages. It is important at this point to note that Greek has a somewhat peculiar status: it exhibits an intermediate stage where the periphrastic construction with ékhō coexists in synchrony with earlier patterns of use and testifies to the gradual process of acquisition of new structures through linguistic contact.

. Gradualness in lexical extension: Defining the semantic core of the AP construction

It is readily apparent from the data discussed in the previous section that the AP construction spread to varying extents both in space and time. The replicated con-struction seems to be more grammaticalized in geographically closer languages than in languages spoken at some distance from the center of innovation. An especially interesting aspect of this issue is the follow-up question as to whether we can iden-tify regular paths of polysemic extension along which the AP construction tended to spread in different languages. We can therefore ask in this regard what feelings each language encodes first with the possessive construction and what functions are, con-versely, less typical fillers of this structure. The question of exactly which functions of possessive constructions are more prone or which are more reluctant has been widely debated in linguistic literature (see e.g. Seiler 1983; Taylor 1989: 202; Langacker 1995; Heine 1997; Stassen 2009, and the recent overview provided by Baldi & Nuti 2010). However, an interesting question which has not yet been raised is how to character-ize the functional core of the abstract possession and how to define the prototypical semantics it covers. These considerations leave us with the question, however, precisely how to characterize the use of possessive structures in the realm of experience, as the notion of AP itself has thus far been too vaguely formulated.8 We therefore attempt to give a cross-linguistically more principled and satisfying account.

. See, for example, Heine (1997: 34), who simply states that in AP, “the possessee is a concept that is not visible or tangible, like a disease, a feeling, or some other psychological state” and Stassen (2009: 20), who merely remarks that in the case of AP the notion of control between the possessor and the possessee is absent and the possessee is transitory. In the relevant lit-erature there is no further specification as to the semantic characterization of this complex functional subdomain of possession.



Our procedure in this section has been to compare the range of meanings covered by this construction in different languages spoken in the CM area. These issues clearly pertain to the field of lexical typology.

First, in order to establish whether there were lexical implications in the realm of psychological and physical feelings and other abstract states that can be possible fillers of the AP, we have compared their cross-linguistic distribution in all CM languages. Our findings are summarized in Table 2 below.

Considerations of space prevent us from going into these data in great detail. Nevertheless, we would like to draw attention to the following facts:

1. physical feelings (hunger, thirst, heat, cold, sleep) and, above all, physical pains and diseases (temperature, stomach ache, headache) are the most likely SoAs to be expressed by the AP construction (in thirteen, eight and seven languages out of 14, to be more precise); note that temperature is the only concept expressed using this construction in Palestinian Arabic;

2. the two intersubjective states of “being right/wrong” constitute a lexical island in our range of fillers, as they are always coded by means of prototypical possessive constructions in our data, the only exception for “being right” being Macedonian (vo pravo sum, literally ‘in right I.am’).

3. Emotions such as “fear, worry, restlessness”, and abstract states like “hurry” and age are only rarely coded with the AP construction in the languages we have surveyed and are preferably expressed by means of stative verbs or predicative adjectives (for further discussion, see Manzelli, Ramat & Roma 2002: 235).

An interesting implication that emerges from this discussion is the following:

physical feelings > mental feelings.

This semantic hierarchy acknowledges the fact that physical feelings constitute the basic scenario that is most compatible with the AP construction. If a language employs it to express an emotion, with more than chance probability it will also do so when conveying a physical feeling, while the opposite implication does not hold.9 We suggest

. An exception is Moroccan Arabic:

fiyya ž-žu lǝ-‘teš, shāna, l-berd, n–n‘ās in-me hunger thirst heat/temperature the-cold the-sleep

Note that the lexical item for “heat” is metonymically also used to mean “temperature”. “Heat”, along with the physical states “hunger”, “thirst”, “cold” and “sleep” typically enters a locative construction in this Arabic variety. This explains why temperature does not belong to the AP construction.



Tabl

e 2.

“Fi

llers

of t

he A

P co

nstr

uctio

n in

the

CM

are

a”

Sp.

Fr.

It.

Mal

tSe

rbo-

C

roat

Slov

.A

lb.

Bulg

.M

ac.

Gr.

Tk.

Pale

st.

Ara

bic

Egyp

t.

Ara

bic

Mor

occ.

A

rabi

c

hung

erth

irst

heat

cold

sleep

tem

pera

ture

Stom

ach

ache

head

ache

fear

wor

ryre

stle

ssne

ssrig

htw

rong

trus

thu

rry

age



that this tendency has conceptual motivations. Physical feelings are physiologically based and thus constitute more stable states that one feels with higher regularity on one’s own skin: in our everyday life we constantly experience the stimulus of hunger, thirst, or sleep. Put in a nutshell, physical feelings are the most basic elements of our lived experience. We live with them at every moment: we always receive stimuli from the surrounding environment as well as from our own bodies and we are regularly exposed to an uninterrupted flow of physical sensations. Crucially, physical manifes-tations result naturally from our physiological needs and they typically have concrete and observable consequences, such as facial blood flow and changes in skin tempera-ture. Arguably, this explains why these concepts first enter the AP construction, and especially fever, with its clearly visible signs: high blood temperature, sweating and freezing. By contrast, emotions are located at the opposing pole: they are typically temporary, accidental and/or sudden, thus less stable and regularly felt; moreover, they do not typically have observable physical reactions. This is why they are more difficult to be conceptualized as things that can be owned and why they enter the AP construc-tion much less frequently in the languages surveyed: to have a temperature or to get a stomach ache is certainly less abstract than to be in a hurry or thirty years old.

. Conclusions

In the course of our paper we have touched upon several issues, ranging from the syn-chronic variation attested in Latin to express AP to the historical development of the habēre construction in Romance languages and its gradual spread in the CM area, as well as its functional competition with other structures in different languages. Lastly, besides addressing the issue of the gradual expansion of the AP construction through contact-induced grammatical replication, we have also attempted to provide a prin-cipled characterization of its semantic core by comparing the typical fillers it takes in different languages. This enabled us to define the privileged pathways along which this structure was gradually extended beyond its functional prototype in the domain of experience and to provide evidence that, as convincingly shown for example by Heine & Kuteva (2005), contact-induced grammatical replication is triggered and con-strained by universal principles of grammaticalization.

More specifically, our case study has revealed that when possessive constructions accommodate new meanings, the semantic content of the relevant verb is weakened and generalized to a semi- auxiliary function. This fact can be seen as a consequence of a change in the semantic structure of the construction, which is extended beyond its functional core to cover less prototypical meanings. We have seen that in many CM languages possessive constructions have undergone an increase in frequency of fillers compatible with the general schema and have consistently also undergone a process



of semantic bleaching. This results in a process of constructional generalization (see e.g. Geeraerts 2010: 26–27). The more a verb like “to have” is used, the more it is bleached and becomes what French linguists call “verbe support”. The Italian verb avere, which is used in 15 cases out of 16, has undergone a stronger bleaching process than, say, Bulgarian, which has just 4 constructs with “have”. In languages spoken close to the center of innovation, therefore, the construction is more likely to accommodate new uses and new circumstances of use.

With regard to areal lexical typology, cross-linguistic evidence shows that although physical feelings are not prototypical possessions, they are more likely to be conceived of as a “bodily property” felt on one’s skin. Therefore, another general conclusion we can draw is that processes of lexical extension are not random but triggered by presumably universal conceptual principles of human behavior and rest on general cognitive strategies. This view is entirely in keeping with a functional-ist approach to language seen as a problem-solving system. If we look at languages from this functional point of view in a cognitive perspective, “we have to admit that there exist linguistic strategies which are cross-linguistically valid perhaps universally valid, inasmuch they reflect more general cognitive strategies which are proper of the human mind” (Ramat 2004: 414). In this context, our investigation on the inchoative construction featuring the verb for come in different languages has illustrated that presumably universal cognitive strategies are constantly at work in shaping linguistic structures. As Heine (1997: 6) puts it: “while the choice of sources is determined pri-marily by universal ways of conceptualization, it is also influenced by other factors, especially by areal forces”.

Focus on the dynamic interface between synchrony and diachrony

Among the theoretical outcomes of our work relevant to the hotly debated topics addressed in the present volume, three noteworthy points have emerged.

First, our data provide evidence in support of the general claim that language change is usually the result of a conspiracy of earlier synchronic variations. We have shown that in Latin two competing constructions alternated to express the same func-tion. Later, only one got the upper hand over the other and prevailed in nearly all Romance languages, although to varying extents (see Fedriani, Manzelli & Ramat 2011 on the peripheral cases of Romanian and Portuguese). We have shown that although it gradually spread in neighboring languages, in some cases (e.g. in Greek) the new AP construction triggered a broader reorganization of the constructional taxon-omy within the functional domain concerned, since, as pointed out by, for example, Traugott (2008), when two or more strategies compete in the same “niche” to express the same function, the increased use of one construction will go together with the decrease, marginalization or elimination of the other(s).



Second, we hope to have shown that contact-induced replication is gradual rather than abrupt both in space and time: the closer the model and the replica lan-guages, the faster and deeper the grammaticalization process. This correlation testi-fies to the utmost importance of historical, areal and cultural factors in directing and constraining language change.

Third, we have seen that the AP construction tends more to instantiate feelings pertaining to bodily functions such as hunger or sleep, and to subsequently spread gradually to other, less prototypical domains: in the replica languages, abstract states like age and hurry are more resistant to this structure. This shows that the way in which a construction grammaticalizes and is extended step by step to cover new meanings is strongly affected by semantic and pragmatic factors.

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