Nominal Possession in American Sign Language

This restriction cannot be attributed to an animacy hierarchy effect with respect to the interpretation of possessors in ASL, nor can it be straightforwardly accommodated by semantic approaches analyzing possession as a contextually-defined relational variable (see Barker 1995 for English). The analysis here does account for this restriction, appealing only to (a) independently-motivated properties of poss possessives and (b) their interaction with the nominalization reduplication process. I begin with syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of forming reduplicated nominals low in the decomposed verbal structure (ResP). This approach necessitates that possessors be introduced inside of the DP, not promoted from a verbal argument position. Restriction against theme argument possessors are thus not phraseable as such and are instead shown to be an epiphenomenon arising as a consequence of the possessive relations poss can encode.