Prototypical Possessive Dative in Lithuanian

Abstract

The article represents one of the semantic dative usage called the dative possession. It is the first attempt to characterize the Lithuanian constructions with external possessors (alternating with adnominal genitives) taking account the results of recent typological research into external possession. However, the attention is mainly paid to the notion and the main properties of the possessive dative. The article presents the linguistic analysis of the Lithuanian possessive dative from the cognitive point of view underlining its prototypical attributes and the ways of expression of three main components in the possessive dative constructions: the possessor, the possessum and the predicate emphasizing their syntactic and semantic properties in Lithuanian sentence structures. Only preliminary observations are made, but it is already possible to state that the Lithuanian constructions with external possessors belong to the prototypical area, in which these constructions are subject to a number of constraints mainly with regard to animacy and degree of affectedness.