Possessorspecific

Possessorspecific is a term used in linguistics to describe a property of possessive constructions in which marking or marking patterns encode information about the possessor’s specificity or identifiability. In languages described as having possessor-specific marking, the form of possession can depend on whether the possessor is definite or uniquely identifiable versus indefinite or non-specific. The concept is used to discuss how possession interacts with definiteness, discourse givenness, and referential status within noun phrases.

The marking mechanisms associated with possessor specificity can vary. Some languages show morphological changes on the possessed noun that signal the possessor’s specificity, others use dedicated possessive determiners or demonstratives when the possessor is definite, and still others employ agreement across the determiner or the entire noun phrase conditioned by possessor properties. In contrast, non-specific possession typically relies on general possessive forms or on the absence of specificity-marking, producing readings where the possessor is not identifiable in discourse. The phenomenon often interacts with other grammatical features such as animacy, definiteness, and word order.

Typologically, possessor-specific marking is not uniform across languages. It may be more or less explicit, and it can correlate with how a language encodes definiteness and anaphora in the DP. Some languages rely on determiner presence, demonstratives, or pronoun agreement to signal that the possessor is specific, while others encode these distinctions through possessed-noun morphology or through syntactic constraints on the noun phrase.

See also: possessive construction, definiteness, specificity, determiner systems. Note that terminology and definitions vary across literature, and some researchers describe related phenomena under different labels or frameworks.