Chapter 98Predicative Possession

98.1 The possessor as subject: kor

Possession can be predicated with transitive kor ‘have’. The possessor is its subject and the possessed entity its object. Its meanings include family relationships and affiliation, so an English translation with ‘own’ is often too narrow. Chudá discusses these uses under the label HAVE construction Chudá (2025: 250–253).

The same verb occurs inside noun phrases such as cise kor kur ‘master of the house’ and nupuri kor kamuy ‘deity of the mountain’ Chudá (2025: 250, example 12). There the following noun is characterized through its relationship with the preceding entity. See Chapter 46 (Adnominal Possession and Double Marking) for the structure of possessive noun phrases.

98.2 The possessed entity as subject: an

An existential construction presents the possessed entity as present. Its possessor can be expressed inside an affiliative noun, while the existential predicates the existence of that noun's referent. Chudá calls this the BE construction Chudá (2025: 252–253).

The possessive prefix does not index the subject of an. The relatives themselves are its third-person subjects. This difference explains why a first-person English translation need not have a first-person marker on the existential.

Existence and living together can overlap in context. Chudá's a=sa-ha an hine oka=an is translated ‘I lived with my elder sister’: the sister exists or lives there, and the narrator and sister live together Chudá (2025: 252, example 17 and note 6).

98.3 Lexical range and corpus observations

Chudá reports that HAVE constructions make up more than 80% of the predicative possession in her corpus analysis Chudá (2025: 250). She associates existential possession with kinship and body-part nouns, and reports no alienable-noun examples in the oral-literature data discussed Chudá (2025: 252–253). These are the distributional findings of that study.

Refsing's description allows existential possession beyond inalienable nouns Refsing (1986: 161). The sources therefore give different accounts of its range. A universal restriction to kinship and body parts would obscure this difference. For the separate lexical restrictions on affiliative noun forms, see Chapter 43 (Possessive Constructions and Alienability).

98.4 Incorporation, change, and lack

A noun can also form an incorporated stem with kor. Chudá contrasts intransitive pokor with the two-word po kor, and notes the frequent change-of-state meaning ‘have a child, give birth’ in the incorporated form. Related lexical formations include matkor ‘marry’ and honkor ‘become pregnant’ Chudá (2025: 251). Their conventional meanings go beyond a general statement of possession.

Negative possession can be expressed with sak ‘lack’; negative existence uses isam Bugaeva (2012: 496). Nakagawa's Saru example describes a wealthy man's wife as lacking even a necklace with tamasay ka sak Nakagawa (2024: 323, example 533). These lexical predicates have their own argument structures. The choice between them follows what is being predicated of which participant.