The functioning of the verb of possession in the Ibero-Romance languages

Abstract

The article deals with the verb of possession in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese (tener/tenir/ têr), which, along with the possessive groups and pronominal constructions, is an essential component of the phenomena of possession in the Ibero-Romance languages. The peculiarity of the languages of the Iberian Peninsula consists in the ability to denote the existence and possession not using two, but four verbal units (derivatives of the Latin verbs habere, tenere, essere, and stare). The studied phenomenon indicates the idioethnic originality of the systems of the basic verbs of the Ibero-Romance languages, most consistently and systematically manifested in modern Spanish (due to the presence of two dichotomies haber/tener and ser/ estar). The concrete empirical material shows that the leading role in the synonymic relations between these correlating verbs belongs to the verb tener. Identifying various configurations of the subject-(predicate)-object relations in the predicate-argument structure of the IberoRomance simple sentence shows that the verb of possession is used not only in the qualitative characteristic features of the subject (the subject models), but also in the quantitative characteristics of the action/status of one of the actants in the position of a real or fictitious subject (pseudo-object and object active and stative models), which provides the formation of numerous correlations with the verbs ser, estar, haber and their synonyms within the two lines: existentiality — stativity — locativity and activity — possessivity. The derivatives of the Latin verb tenere, being truly universal verbal units, reveal the action of one of the most striking tendencies to the activization of the proposition in the Ibero-Romance languages as one of the manifestations of subjectivity pervading the whole language system.