The expressions of predicative possession in Ancient Greek: ésti moi and ésti mou constructions. A cognitive-functional approach

As is well known, early Indo-European languages had different ways of expressing the predicative possession: 1) verbs with a transitive construction, like the Ancient Greek ékho; these are more recent and have developed differently in the various languages (Proto-Indo-European, actually, lacked a transitive verb ‘to have’); 2) predicative construction like ésti moi and ésti mou, which included a form of the verb ‘to be’ and an oblique case, denoting the Possessor, while the Possessee was expressed by the subject of the verb. On the basis of these two kinds of predicative structures, Isačenko (1974) differentiated world languages in «have» and «be languages». The aim of our paper is to re-examine in a contrastive way two kinds of possessive sentences of Ancient Greek, oesti moi and oesti mou (moi and mou represent any nominal/pronominal constituent), and to describe the functional differentiation between them, taking into consideration multiple parameters: a) semantic, b) syntactic and c) pragmatic.