Comprehensive reference grammar of Ingush, a language of the Nakh branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian or East Caucasian language family of the central Caucasus (southern Russia). Ingush is notable for its complex phonology, prosody including minimal tone system, complex morphology of both nouns and verbs, clause chaining, long-distance reflexivization, and extreme degree of syntactic ergativity.

The languages of the world encode possession in a variety of ways. In Slavic languages, possession on the level of the clause, or predicative possession, is represented by two main encoding strategies. Most Slavic languages, including those in the West and South Slavic sub-groupings, use a `have' verb comparable to English have and German haben. But Russian, an East Slavic language, encodes predicative possession only infrequently with its `have' verb imet'; instead, Russian uses a construction for predicative possession originating in a locative phrase, e.g. u menja est' kniga, which literally means `at me is a book' for `I have a book'.

This locative construction for predicative possession in Russian is often singled out as an aberrant construction in Slavic and attributed to contact-induced influence from Finnic languages. The opposite point of view is also put forth: that the locative construction for predicative possession in Russian is the original construction inherited from Late Proto-Slavic and the `have' verb used in other Slavic languages is merely a calque from Greek. Neither explanation is entirely satisfactory. As a matter of fact, early Slavic textual traditions, based on a comparison of textual examples from Old Church Slavic, Old Serbian and Croatian, Old Czech, and Early East Slavic, reveal that both a `have' verb and a locative construction for predicative possession were used in Late Proto-Slavic, alongside a third construction with the possessor encoded in the dative case.

The present-day distribution of encoding strategies in the Slavic languages is explained by tracing the different textual and population histories for multiple areas of Slavdom. Contacts with neighboring languages, especially neighboring non-Slavic languages, over the course of history influenced predicative possessive constructions (PPCs) in all areas of Slavdom. Because the Slavic languages spread rather rapidly over a vast geographic expanse, covering most of Eastern Europe in a matter of a few centuries in the latter half of the first millennium CE, the languages that different Slavic populations came into contact with were often quite different. In particular, languages in the western end of Slavdom were in contact with German-speaking populations to varying degrees of intensity; in the northeastern end of Slavdom, Early East Slavic assimilated and lived alongside large numbers of originally Finnic-speaking populations, who spoke languages closely related to Modern Finnish and Estonian.

In short, each Slavic language expanded usage of one of the three original encoding strategies for predicative possession already attested in Late Proto-Slavic and the encoding strategy that expanded brought it closer to usage in neighboring and historically substrate non-Slavic languages. Not only the form of the PPCs themselves came to parallel usage in neighboring non-Slavic languages, but the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of the Slavic constructions also converged with the PPCs used in areal languages. Additional support for the scenarios put forth in this dissertation comes from examination of factors outside the domain of predicative possession, including linguistic features other than predicative possession, textual histories and considerations of language standardization in different areas, socio-historical factors, and demographic factors. While this dissertation traces the development of one grammatical category - predicative possession - in the history of Slavic, the scenarios outlined are meant to contribute more generally to an understanding of linguistic change in the history of Slavic and how those changes reflect the influence of population processes on shaping the path of historical linguistic change.

This thesis explains how secondary predication is constructed. It focuses on Polish, with some comparisons to other languages, and provides analysis on the syntactic, morphological and semantic level in the paradigm of Minimalism.

It starts with a definition of primary and secondary predication, maintaining that only adjuncts are true secondary predicates. This is followed by an introduction of a new phrase type, bipartite, to Polish linguistics – an expression consisting of a preposition and adjective or, sometimes, a noun. It is shown that bipartites are not simply adverbs, for which they have been taken so far, but they can serve in a variety of functions, some of them typical for adjectives, such as attributive modifier or predicative use. That predicative use, especially in secondary predication, is then in the focus of the rest of this work.

The morphosyntactic composition of secondary predication is discussed in detail, showing that lexically secondary predicates involve both adjectives and nouns (to a much lesser extent). Structurally, secondary predicates are divided into bare ones, consisting of an adjective or noun, and prepositional ones, involving bipartites, and thus consisting of a combination of a preposition and adjective or noun. Semantically, secondary predicates can be depictive or resultative. It is also illustrated that although secondary predicates fall into the category of adjuncts, they must be clearly distinguished from adverbials, attributives, interjections and absolutes.

The second part of this study concentrates on the syntax of secondary predication. It shows that secondary predicates are best described as small clauses with a predicator serving as Pr head. Three attachment sites are proposed that allow for unambiguous subject and object control, as well as separation of depictives and resultatives from circumstantials.

Secondary predicates can both agree and not agree with controlling NPs. Cases are discussed where agreement is obligatory, optional or blocked. In order to account for this variety, two types of Pr head (small clause head) are assumed: the full one blocks agreement and may assign its own case, the defective one allows agreement. The agreement involves both Agree and feature sharing between the controlling NP and secondary predicate. Finally, long distance control of secondary predicates in non-finite constructions and verbal nouns is explained.

Additional to dichotomy depictive vs. resultative, a third group, the co-called circumstantials, is identified which differs significantly from the former ones not only in semantics, but also in lexical composition (they are predominantly nominal) and attachment site (inside NP).