Datif, possessif, article défini, ou comment se passer de la possession inaliénable
Abstracts
The range of contexts which license a possessive reading with a definite article in e.g. French Jean lève la jambe, 'John raises the [= his] leg') may vary from one language to the next (the case instantiated by Jean l'a pris par la main 'John took him by the hand', being of another nature). This variation makes it impossible to account for this phenomenon in encyclopedic terms involving properties of the physical world. Basing ourselves on comparative data from English, Spanish and French, we argue that the possessive reading of the definite article is crucially licensed by the availability of the dative case. In a language lacking a morphological dative (e.g. English), articles do not license the possessive reading. In a morphological-dative language, the distribution of the article depends on the range of verbs which license locative internal arguments expressing a contiguity relation. French verbs only exhibit this property if their thematic grid licenses a Goal, whereas Spanish verbs are not subject to this restriction. It follows that the possessive reading of articles has a far broader distribution in Spanish than in French.
Index terms
Keywords:
contiguity, dative, definite article, locative argument, possessive, quasi-thematic dativeReferences
Bibliographical reference
Mario Barra-Jover, “Datif, possessif, article défini, ou comment se passer de la possession inaliénable”, Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes, 31 | 2002, 43-60.
Electronic reference
Mario Barra-Jover, “Datif, possessif, article défini, ou comment se passer de la possession inaliénable”, Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes [Online], 31 | 2002, Online since 06 June 2005, connection on 24 March 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rlv/365; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rlv.365
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