Predicative possessives in Budai Rukai

Across world’s languages, predicative possessives (X has Y; He has a dog.) are expressed by different syntactic strategies (Heine 1997, Stassen 2009, Myler 2014, 2014, a.o.). In Budai Rukai (Austronesian, Taiwan), predicative possessives surface as ‘X’s Y exists’ (His dog exists; with the predicative possessor being genitive and the possessum being nominative) and also like locatives ‘Y is with X’ (A dog is with him; with the predicative possessor being oblique and the possessum being nominative). In this talk, I present evidence that the genitive and oblique possessors behave as grammatical subjects in both constructions, whereas the nominative possessum is an inert argument. I argue that the prima facie mismatch between case and grammatical relations is resolved by A-movement and copies: while the lower copy of the predicative possessor is pronounced, the higher copy shows the subject properties and feeds subject-restricted A’-movement. Moreover, I propose two Appls of different flavors in predicative possessives, athematic and thematic (following Georgala et al. 2008, Georgala 2012), to account for the genitive and oblique possessor. A new structural possibility is thus provided for the construction ‘X’s Y exists’, an approach different from Huang 2013 and Myler 2014, 2016.