AMERINDIA 42: 49-73, 2020
Francisco ARELLANES ARELLANES
Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas-UNAM
DOI : https://doi.org/10.56551/PFYB2080
Abstract: San Pablo Güilá Zapotec has four coding strategies for nominal possession:
juxtaposition, suppletion, prefixation, and use of a preposition. These strategies are
problematic for theoretical approaches that only distinguish between alienable and
inalienable possession and explain the varying amount of formal resources employed to
encode alienable vs. inalienable possession with the Iconicity Principle. In this work, a
broad semantic set of possession relations is recognized, which are organized in three
semantic domains defined by the animacy parameter. Two scales are proposed: one for
the degrees of conceptual integration for each domain, and one for the degrees of
morphosyntactic integration of the four coding strategies. It is concluded that the
Iconicity Principle restrictsthe possible correlations between the members of both scales
without reducing them to a single one.