This book is a detailed study of the possessive semantic space within the framework of construction grammar. Using corpus data from Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, the book uses semantic maps to document the relationship between form and meaning in a set of semantically closely related syntactic constructions that can all express adnominal possession and all partially overlap. The book also traces the development of these constructions from the earliest Slavic attestations towards Modern Russian, thus also using the semantic maps as a diachronic tool.

This approach results in...