The parameter
Two constructions sit under this heading. Predicative possession is the clause "X has Y"; adnominal possession is the phrase "X's Y". The parameter measures what grammatical role the possessor takes, and where the relation is marked.
In a have-language the possessor is the subject of a transitive verb and the possessed item is its object. In an existential language there is no such verb: the possessed item is the subject of a clause meaning "exists", and the possessor is an oblique, marked by a case ending or an adposition meaning "at" or "on". The difference is not stylistic. The two constructions put different material in subject position, and so make different things the topic.
A second question is whether the relation is marked on the head, meaning the possessed noun, or on the dependent, meaning the possessor. English marks the dependent, with 's; Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian mark the head, with a suffix on the possessed noun. A third is whether nouns divide into classes by how they are possessed, separating kin and body parts from what can be given away.
How languages vary
- Have-verb: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Modern Greek. The possessor is the grammatical subject.
- Belong or exist construction: Turkish, with var and yok; Russian, with u plus the genitive; Irish, with tá plus ag; Finnish, with the adessive case; Hungarian; Standard Arabic, with ʿinda.
- Possessive affixes: Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian and the Semitic languages, where the possessor is a suffix on the possessed noun.
- Alienable and inalienable distinction: widespread in Oceania and the Americas, where kinship and body-part terms take one construction and other nouns take another.
Stassen's WALS chapter 117 samples 240 languages and finds five predicative strategies in comparable numbers: 63 have-possessives, 59 conjunctional, 48 locational, 48 topic and 22 genitive. The transitive have-verb of western Europe is one option among several rather than the norm. Nichols and Bickel's chapter 59 samples 243 languages for possessive classification: 125 have none, 94 have two classes, 20 have three to five and 4 have more, with the largest systems concentrated around the Pacific.
Consequences for translation
The mismatch is not a lexical problem. It is a clause that has to be rebuilt. No Turkish or Russian word corresponds to "have", and the English sentence cannot be rendered without changing which element is the subject. That is a structure shift, and usually a transposition too, since a verb corresponds to an existential predicate or a case ending.
The professional risk is that this passes review. Both versions read naturally, the content survives, and nothing looks wrong on either side. What changed is quieter: the sentence now talks about the possessor rather than the possession, or the reverse. A reviser catches that only by reading the passage rather than the segment. Three further points arise in official work.
Possession and ownership are different claims. An existential possessive says that something is with someone. It does not say who holds title. English forces a choice among "has", "owns", "holds" and "is registered to", every one of which is more specific than the source. In property and inheritance documents that added specificity is information change rather than explicitation, and the safe rendering is the least committal the register allows.
Negation is packaged differently. Turkish negates existence with a single word, yok, where English negates the verb. "Does not have" is normal and "there is no" is sometimes closer, and the choice is a converse pairing, not a synonym.
Segment length shifts predictably. A two-word Turkish possessive clause becomes a four-word English one, and possessive suffixes fold an English pronoun into the noun, which makes word-count estimates unreliable.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: Bir arabam var.
- Target: I have a car.
- Comment: Literally, "a car of mine exists". The possessor is a suffix on the possessed noun, and that noun is the subject of an existential predicate. English makes the possessor the subject of a transitive verb, and nothing corresponds to "have".
RU>EN
- Source: У меня есть машина. / У меня нет машины.
- Target: I have a car. / I do not have a car.
- Comment: "At me there is a car." The possessor sits in the genitive after a preposition and the possessed item is the nominative subject. Under negation the possessed item goes into the genitive too, restructuring the clause where English only negates the verb.
EN>TR
- Source: He raised his hand.
- Target: Elini kaldırdı.
- Comment: Four words to one. The possessor is a suffix on the body-part noun and the subject pronoun is dropped, since the verb carries person. In this direction the possessive pronoun disappears into morphology; the other way, English has to supply one.
References
- Stassen, L. (2013). "Predicative Possession." In M. S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (eds), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, chapter 117. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Nichols, J. & Bickel, B. (2013). "Possessive Classification." In WALS Online, chapter 59.
- Stassen, L. (2009). Predicative Possession. Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Heine, B. (1997). Possession: Cognitive Sources, Forces, and Grammaticalization. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Croft, W. (2003). Typology and Universals, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.