I POSSESSIVI NEL CROATO MOLISANO
POSSESSIVES IN MOLISE CROATIAN

Summary/Abstract: Following the proposal in Seiler and Heine, possession is defined in terms of relationship between two entities, called possessor and possessed. Linguistic possession can be of different types: permanent, physical, inalienable, abstract, etc. In Italian and Croatian, possession is expressed by adjectives, pronouns, and prepositional phrases. In Croatian, it can be expressed also by morphological cases. In Italian, possession is rendered with possessive adjectives and pronouns (mia sorella) and the complement of possessive specification (la sorella di Mira). In Croatian, it is expressed equally (moja sestra); with the dative of the personal pronouns (sestra mi); with the possessive adjectives (posvojni pridjev; Mirina sestra); with the double genitive (sestra mojega oca); with the complement of possessive specification in the substandard varieties (sestra od Mire). The contribution investigates the ways to express possession in Molise Croatian, a štokavo-ikavo variety in use in the linguistic island of the Croatian minority in Italy, in Molise, from a contact-linguistics and contrastive perspective. As at all linguistic levels, when indicating ownership, Molise Croatian has conservative, Croatian, and innovative uses and forms, derived from contact with Italian and the Abruzzo-Molisan variety. In Molise Croatian, one can express ownership by using possessive pronouns (posvojne zamjenice/pridjevi; moja sestra); the dative of personal pronouns (sestra mi); the possessive adjective (posvojni pridjev; sestra Mirina); the complement of possessive specification (sestra do Mire); the double genitive (sestra mojoga oca). The main objective of this corpus-based research is to analyse and describe the influence of Italian and of the Abruzzo-Molisan variety on the morphosyntax and the distribution of possessives in Molise Croatian.

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