The Western Romance drift away from external dative possessors

Abstract

Romance external possession (EP) can encode the possessor as subject, accusative, or dative; e. g.

(1)	J'ai baisse les yeux. ‘I lowered the eyes.’
(2)	Elle l'a caressé sur les joues. ‘She caressed him on the cheeks.’
(3)	Paul.lui a gratté le visage. ‘Paul dtv.-3sg. scratched the face.’

This paper argues that while the first two have remained stable, internal possession (IP) is taking over from dative-encoded external possession (D-EP) in French and Brazilian Portuguese; e. g.

(4)	Sa main tremblait. ‘Her hand was trembling.’
(5)	La voix de I'homme politique n'y pouvait rien contre la clameur générate. ‘The politician's voice was powerless against the general uproar.’

This drift is much more apparent in Brazilian Portuguese because of thereduction of its clitic system. There has been no “rise” in Romance of D-EP, which has been present since at least Latin and probably much earlier. D-EP has long coexisted with IP, which contrasts with it from semantic and pragmatic standpoints.

The retreat of D-EP is reflected through its restrictions and variations in the semantics of the verb and the possessum (French), the trend in non-standard varieties towards IP (both languages), the behaviour of D-EP with clitics (Brazilian) and in complex predicates (French), and the greater productivity of IP (both languages). These findings support the hypothesis of Haspelmath and König (1997) that within the European Sprachbund, D-EP is weakest in geographically peripheral languages.