Predicative Possessive Constructions in Hindi

Abstract

Hindi has more than one construction for the encoding of possessive relationships: in particular, this language lacks a nominative‑accusative construction and a ‘have’‑verb, and instead encodes possession through intransitive sentences with the Possessor in an oblique case (mainly locative or genitive). This paper describes and analyses the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of Hindi predicative possessive constructions. It shows that each possessive construction in Hindi is customised to encode particular semantic properties, and that the high iconicity of this language accounts for its lack of a nominative‑accusative construction for the expression of possession.

Keywords

• Genitive constructions. Hindi. Iconicity. Locative constructions. Predicative possession