I am currently planning my new autumn/winter course on possessive constructions at the University of Cologne. The course will use experimental and corpus data to compare adnominal, predicative, and external possessive constructions cross-linguistically. It will also discuss the processing and acquisition of possessive constructions as well as language change. The starting point will be the project pages and references below. I am grateful for any pointers to further resources and will post further materials on this blog (as I have done for my recent course on “Psycholinguistics in the Field“).
Sonja
Project Webpages
World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS)
http://wals.info/ , with several chapters and maps about possessive constructions
Manchester Database for English and Swedish Adnominal Possessives
http://www.projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/germanicpossessive/database/
The Prominent Possessor Project
http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/projects/prominent-possessors/
Core References
Börjars, K., Denison, D., & Scott, A. (Eds.) (2013). Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Heine, B. (2006). Possession: Cognitive sources, forces, and grammaticalization. Cambidge: Cambridge University Press.
McGregor, W. (2009). The expression of possession. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Seiler, H. (1983). Possession as an operational dimension of language. Tübingen: Narr
Taylor, J. R. (1996). Possessives in English: An exploration in cognitive grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
For further reading lists, in particular for research methods and tools, see https://experimentalfieldlinguistics.wordpress.com/
Experimental Linguistics in the Field 