Possession and attributive modification: a conceptual and typological investigation

All languages have ways to modify nouns (e.g. adjectives) and to express possession (e.g. by the preposition of), but many languages lack these grammatical devices and use a variety of other means, often blurring the distinction between the two categories. Although linguists have studied adjectival constructions and possessive constructions there has been very little research on the (very tricky) question of how adjectival and possessive constructions relate to each other. We will survey previous research on the ways nouns can be modified across languages and we will provide a preliminary conceptual analysis of the problem.