Abstract
This paper examines the possessive system in Finnish. Finnish has morphologically bound possessive suffixes which are hosted by the possessed nouns. These suffixes interact with syntactically independent genitive pronouns and lexical nouns in a complex way. The analysis presented here is based on previous Lexical-FunctionalGrammar (LFG) analyses of subject and object `pro-drop' phenomena. The bound morphemes have for theory-internal reasons previously been assumed to correspond to dual functions: a pronominal function and an agreement function. The Finnish data provide new, empirical evidence for this dual function.
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Toivonen, I. The Morphsyntax Of Finnish Possessives. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 18, 579–609 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006424127728
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006424127728