Types of Possessive Structures in the Balkan languages and in Arberesh

In this paper, we analyse the syntactic structures associated with predicative possession in Albanian, Bulgarian, Modern Greek and Arbëresh. Many languages model their possessive constructions on the split between alienable (which includes temporary possession and permanent possession) and inalienable possession (which involves kinship terms, body parts, physical traits, abstract properties, part-whole relations). The languages we analyse show that this split (alienable vs. inalienable) is not sufficient to cover the entire domain of what is called possession. More than these two domains are relevant for the languages under study. From the syntactic point of view, two predominant strategies have been identified to express the predicative possession in these languages: the use of a verb like HAVE and the use of a verb like BE and a preposition. While typical for many non-Indo-European languages, this second strategy is quite rare in the Indo-European family. The literature (Stolz et al. 2008; Stassen 2009) reports similar cases only from two languages: Icelandic and Portuguese.