Animacy and Its Constraint on the Realization of Possessive Relations

Animacy, both a universal semantic primitive, and a typological universal in human languages, has a great impact, on the coding of possessive relations in their realisations as possessive constructions in the following aspects:1) the higher in animacy the possessor, the more potential interpretations of the construction; 2) if the possessor is high in the animacy hierarchy, it is interpreted as subject in the construction, otherwise as object; if the possessor is a pronoun, it can be interpreted as either subject or object according to the context, but in Chinese it is interpreted only as subject; 3) the choice of the -'s or ofconstruction increases or decreases with animacy of the possessor; 4) explicit coding of " de"in Chinese or -'s in English is closely correlated with the animacy of the possessor; 5) implicit coding of " de" leads to the change of meaning and construction type, but still keeps the possessive relations, which will shed light on the explanation of the tricky construction " Wangmian si le fuqin".