This paper examines possessive pronoun forms in Welsh, a feature thought to be undergoing change (Davies, 2016). First, we seek to add to the understanding about how and in which stylistic contexts these forms are used. Second, we examine whether students in Welsh-medium schools with different home language backgrounds show the same sociolinguistic competence. In contrast to what is prescribed in many grammar books, the colloquial form mam fi ‘my mum’ is used at much higher rates than the traditional literary fy mam and sandwich variants fy mam i. This is particularly the case in more casual styles. We also find differences between north and south Wales in overall rates of use, but within the two schools studied, the English home language students broadly show the same patterns and constraints as the Welsh home language students, underlining that language background does not affect the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence.

While relational nouns (cousin) are traditionally delineated in a binary and theory-dependent manner, this article approximates relationality as a continuous, objective corpus metric (Percent Possessive) – allowing for lexicon-wide exploration of which nouns are more or less relational and why. Comparing across nouns and accounting for the ontological class of the noun's referent (focusing on nouns denoting artifacts, natural kinds, occupations, humans and locations), I find that Percent Possessive is positively correlated with a noun's per-million-word frequency. Comparing across different web communities, I find that a noun is more frequent, and shows a greater ratio of definite to indefinite tokens, in the community where its Percent Possessive is significantly higher. I take these findings to be consistent with the claim that a noun is more easily interpreted as relational (as measured by Percent Possessive) when human interaction with its referent is more conventional (as measured by its frequency and definite-to-indefinite ratio). Inspired by the many authors who have suggested a socio-cultural component to relationality and possession, this article explores at scale in English how nouns reflect the conventions of the people who use them.

This article explores the distribution of Arabic reflexive and reciprocal anaphors in various structures as well as the syntactic environments in which such anaphors are (in)admissible. In particular, it examines the binding domains for reflexives and reciprocals and focuses for the most part on the asymmetries between these two types of anaphors in possessive DPs and PPs. It will be shown that the binding facts are better captured by reducing binding domains to phases, that DPs and PPs constitute a phase only when containing a possessive phrase, and that a reflexive and a reciprocal behave differently in such possessive structures in that the latter, unlike the former, undergoes overt movement. Accordingly, it will be argued that reflexive possessives are ungrammatical because they are left unbound in their DP/PP phase, while reciprocal possessives are grammatical since multiple copies of the distributor are created during the derivation due to movement, allowing it to seek an antecedent in the higher vP, its phasal binding domain. For this to hold, Principle A should apply cyclically at the end of each phase; that is, before the complement of the phase head is spelled out.

In this paper, we investigate an ongoing change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that the feminine form of the indefinite article is quickly disappearing from several dialects, which has led to claims that the feminine gender is being lost from the language. We have carried out a study of the status of the feminine in possessives across five age groups of speakers of the Tromsø dialect. Our findings show that the prenominal possessives are affected by the change to the same extent as the indefinite article, while forms that have been argued not to be exponents of gender (the definite suffix and the postnominal possessive) are generally unaffected.

This study investigates possessives and modified definite DPs in a corpus of heritage Norwegian spoken in the US. Both constructions involve variation in Norwegian – two word orders for possessives (pre- and postnominal) and two exponents of definiteness (a prenominal determiner and a suffix) – while English only has one of these options. The findings show that a large majority of the heritage speakers overuse the structures that are maximally different from English structures, i.e., postnominal possessors and single suffixal definiteness marking. We argue that their production pattern is the result of cross-linguistic overcorrection (CLO). In addition, a small group of the heritage speakers show signs of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and overuse the English-like structures in both constructions. These speakers also have a slightly lower proficiency in the heritage language. Our findings are discussed in terms of previous research on monolingual and Norwegian–English bilingual children.