Possession Hardback: Cognitive Sources, Forces, and Grammaticalization: 83 (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Series Number 83) - Hardcover

Bernd Heine argues that the structure of grammatical categories is predictable to a large extent once we know the range of possible cognitive structures from which they are derived. Heine uses as his example the structure of predicative possession, and shows how most of the possessive constructions to be found in the world's languages can be traced back to a small set of basic conceptual patterns.