Structures of adnominal possession in Austria’s base dialects

By means of the first comprehensive apparent-time study of Austria’s base dialects, this paper explores the use of adnominal syntactic constructions of expressing the semantic relation of possession. The article focusses on both the geographical variation and the interplay of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The analyses are based on data from direct recordings of 162 speakers from 40 villages and on written questionnaire data from 103 of these speakers from 37 villages. The analyses reveal clear geographical patterns for those constructions in which the possessor phrase precedes the possessum phrase within the entire construction. We propose to focus on the discursive-pragmatic properties of the possessor phrase to explain the fact that every of the observed dialects allows the possessor to precede the possessum. We provide evidence that referential anchoring, combined with the concept of accessibility is the key to explain the syntactic order within the used constructions.