The role of animacy in the nominal possessive constructions of Modern Low Saxon

The dialects of modern Low Saxon dispose of multiple nominal constructions to express possession. The noun phrases in (1) – (4) exemplify these four different constructions. \n \n(1) sien Huus \n his house \n "his house" \n \n(2) Anna ehr Huus \n Anna her house \n "Anna's house" \n \n(3) Oma's Huus \n grandma=POSS house \n "grandma's house" \n \n(4) dat Huus vun de CDU \n the house of the CDU \n "the house of the Christian Democrats" \n \nAfter establishing these four constructions as a case of syntactic alternation using authentic examples taken from a one million word corpus of Low Saxon texts, I discuss the role of animacy in the domain of nominal possessive constructions. I examine animacy per se and several additional factors that have been connected to animacy in the literature such as concreteness, person, and number. Moreover, I also take a look at the possessive relation between possessor and possessum and discuss how it is connected to animacy. \n \nMy research shows that animacy plays a very important role for the choice of possessive construction in Low Saxon and that the animacy level of the possessor is much more important than the animacy level of the possessum. The three prenominal constructions (1) – (3) in which the possessor phrase precedes the possessum phrase are generally used with more animate possessors than the postnominal construction in (4). This is in line with the few comments on these constructions given in descriptive grammars on Low Saxon, e.g. Saltveit (1983), and with results of previous studies on the possessive alternation in English (eg. Leech et al. 1994 and Rosenbach 2002). The fact that the prenominal possessive constructions in (1) – (3) pattern more closely together than each does with the postnominal possessive construction in (4) lends further support to Rosenbach's theory for English that the influence of animacy on the choice of possessive construction is based on the different linear order of possessor and possessum. However, I will also show that there are some differences between the prenominal constructions regarding the role of animacy.