The first objective of the present study is a typological one to investigate the extent of polysemy as opposed to the use of distinct forms in the lexical fields carved out by copular, locative, existential and possessive verbs in languages of the Mainland East and Southeast Asian area ( Mesea) in a purely synchronic perspective. More recently the link between these semantic domains has been investigated in terms of predicative possession in Heine (1997a, 1997b), Stassen (2009), Creissels (2013), Chappell and Creissels (2019) and also in Mazzitelli (2015) and Myler (2016). In particular, Lyons and Clark were proponents of the influential viewpoint that possessors are animate locations and that, accordingly, possessive constructions are a subclass of locative-existential sentences. This theme has subsequently been expanded into a crosslinguistic survey by Clark (1978) and taken up again in studies by Freeze (1992), Koch (2012), Bentley et al. Notable are Meillet’s (1923) and Benveniste’s (1960) seminal articles on be- and have- languages in Indo-European as well as Lyons (1967, 1968 on the derivation of existential and possessive constructions from locatives. Over the past century, the relationship of existence and location to possession has been the subject of a vast field of research including studies in both linguistics and philosophy. The findings on the patterns of polysemy sharing reinforce the notion of a clear typological split between Tibeto-Burman languages on the one hand, and Sinitic, Kra–Dai, Hmong–Mien, and Austroasiatic on the other. Crucially, the intervening stage of an existential construction provides the necessary bridging context for possessive reanalysis in this first pathway, while possessive verbs are formally distinct from locatives in the second, bearing no diachronic relationship to them. On this basis, an implicational universal is adduced to the effect that no diachronic adjacency exists between locative and possessive constructions. Type I and Type II languages additionally reveal a recurrent polysemy between Locative and Copular verbs. We argue that there are three grammaticalization pathways which motivate the four synchronic patterns: Type III languages are distinguished by the grammaticalization chain: (P ostural verb) > (Dwell) > Locative > Existential > Possessive, while the other two types, Type II and Type IV, show an opposing pathway: ( Grasp) > Possessive > Existential. As a consequence, its second objective is to model the diachronic change underlying four language types identified on this basis from the data. Its first objective is to examine four distinct synchronic patterns of areal polysemy, created by the semantic domains of copular, locative, existential and possessive verbs and the constructions they form.
This study is based on a sample of 116 languages from the Mainland East and Southeast Asian linguistic area.
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