Definitely possessive: The role of the definite article in possessive structures in eastern varieties of Dutch

Introduction. Eastern varieties of Dutch have a range of syntactic configurations that express a possessive relation, but do not contain any morphosyntactic possessive marking in the possessum DP. What these structures have in common is the presence of a definite article. The main aim of this paper is to show that the definite article is crucial in establishing a possessive relation in the relevant constructions, and to explore the option that the definite descriptions in question contain a variable that can be bound by another DP, thereby establishing a relation between the possessor and possessum. Possessive structures. In eastern Dutch dialects, definite articles appear in various constructions with a possessive interpretation. This is for instance the case in external possession constructions, in which the possessor can appear as a dative object (1) or as a nominative subject (2). In addition, the band lek construction (i.a. Van Bree 1981, Broekhuis & Cornips 1994) expresses a relation between the subject and the small clause subject (3). (1) Marie hef 'um vanmargen de hende met zalve behandeld. Mary has him this.morning the hands with cream treated ‘Mary treated his hands with cream this morning.’ (Vorden Dutch) (2) Piet hef vanmarge de hände met zalve behandeld. Piet has this.morning the hands with cream treated ‘Piet treated the (=his) hands with cream this morning.’ (Vorden Dutch) (3) Jan heeft [sc de band lek ]. John has the tire flat ‘John has a flat tire.’ (eastern Dutch dialects) Previous work. Sentences like (1) have received much attention in the literature (see, among many others, Guéron 1985 and Vergnaud & Zubizarreta 1992, Le Bruyn 2014 for French/ English, Lee-Schoenfeld 2007 for German). Some of these works address the structure in (2) as well. The presence of the definite article in the structures in (1) and (2) is often explained against a background of inalienable possession, since these constructions mostly occur with body parts, which are often categorized as inalienable nouns. However, these constructions have not been explained in the context of (3) before, which appears to be crucial in this case. New context. With new data from fieldwork in Dutch dialects, this paper compares the structures in (1)-(3) and sheds new light on the role of the definite article by including (3) in the empirical domain. The band lek construction in (3) has the following characteristics: i) the adjective lek ‘flat’ appears postnominally, whereas adjectives normally appear prenominally; ii) the adjective does not carry inflectional morphology, contrary to other uses of adjectives; iii) the noun band ‘tire’ is introduced by a definite article, the central characteristic for this paper. Jan is interpreted as the owner of the tire. Even though inalienability probably plays a role in (1) and (2), (3) shows that the absence of morphological possessive marking cannot be explained by inalienability alone: (3) is not restricted to inalienable nouns. Tentative proposal. Assuming that the definite article has the same semantics in all three constructions, this means that an analysis of the definite article in terms of inalienability is not sufficient. This paper assigns an important role to the definite article in those cases. While technical details still need to be worked out, the gist of the analysis is that definite descriptions contain a variable that links the possessum to the DP that is interpreted as the possessor in the above cases. In that sense, this paper follows up on Vergnaud & Zubizarreta’s (1992) insight that the possessor binds the possessum.