Expressing Possession in Spanish: The Use of Possessive Datives and Possessive Adjectives in Twentieth-Century Spanish-Language Drama

The present investigation comprises a statistical analysis of the use in Spanish of the possessive dative versus the use of possessive adjectives, with nouns that have the grammatical role of subject, direct object, or copula predicate. The corpus analysed here consists of dialogue taken from four Span ish-language plays dating from the second half of the twentieth century. The results of the analysis provide statistically significant support for the claim that there is a relationship in Spanish between the choice of possessor encoding and the noun class of the possessum and the class of verb. The dative encoding reflects the affected state of the possessor, casting the possessor as a participant in the event. These results follow from Hopper and Thompson's (1980) Transitivity Hypothesis and from the conceptual proximity that obtains between possessor and possessum (Maldonado 2002).