3. Possessive

3a The tracks are a tiger's: the tiger‘owns' the tracks and is identifiable as a tiger (rather than, say, as a lion) by virtue of having made them.

3b Tigers have stripes: the possession of stripes is expected of tigers but they are not a defining characteristic any more than being located in Bengal is.

There is, of course, a final type of process we need to consider exemplified by a sentence like

There are tigers: which is existential in that it does no more than assert the existence of tigers. It should not, of course, be confused with a locative which also uses 'there' (as example 2 above) but as a deictic rather than, as it is here, a 'dummy'.

It will have been noted that, in English, be can be used to express all three sets of relationships (or, more correctly, five of the six realizations of them), although there is quite a range of alternatives available in English which fulfil similar functions; equatives such as equal, represent, stand for ... attributives such as get, look, seem, sound, turn...

Other languages tend to make use of forms of be as well. Some can show the equative intensive relationship – as Russian can in the present tense – by mere juxtaposition of the two roles e.g. 

lvan, saldat i.e. John is a soldier.

Hindu/Urdu uses forms of hona (e.g. hai) in the relational processes in a way which closely parallels English usage:

1a intensive identifying: for both (i) class-membership and (ii) example:

(i) sher jãnwar hai: the tiger is an animal/tigers are animals

(ii) wo sher hai: that is a tiger

1b intensive attributive:

sher bimãr hai: the tiger is sick

2a circumstantial identifying:

wãhã sher hai; there is a tiger

2b circumstantial attributive:

sher Bengãl mẽ hai: there is a tiger/there are tigers in Bengal

3a possessive identifying:

pag sher ki hai; the track is a tiger's

3b possessive attributive:

sher ki dhariã hai: the tiger has stripes/tigers have stripes 

and the existential: sher hai: the tiger exists.

There appears, on the face of it, to be little problem in translating these relationships between Hindi/Urdu and English. There are, however, hidden difficulties:

In Hindi/Urdu and in several other languages (including Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, Turkish and the Celtic languages), a form of be is used for the possessive relationship as well, as we have seen in examples 3a and 3b above, so a literal translation of 

sher ki dhariã hai = tiger + to stripes are: to the tiger are stripes

Further, Hindi/Urdu makes a distinction between permanent and transitory attributes by adding hotã in the first case but using hona alone in the second:

(i) sher jangli hotã hai: the tiger is fierce

                                   tigers are fierce

(i) sher purãnã hai: the tiger is old

In other languages (Portuguese and Spanish, for example), there are also two forms of be but their use is different from the languages we have been considering so far. In Spanish the forms are:

1. ser  for the intensive:   Juan es español:

                                      Juan is Spanish

2. estar for circumstantial:   Juan está aquí:

                                          Juan is here

However, the two forms can also be used to distinguish – as in the Hindi/Urdu case with (hota) hona – the degree of permanence of the attribute, e.g.

1. ser.     Juan es simpático:

              Juan is friendly (permanently)

2. estar.  Juan está simpático:

              Juan is friendly (temporarily)

We are left, then, with a little unease about the universality of the processes proposed by the model. There seems to be a degree of fuzziness between some of them, particularly circumstantial and possessive; perhaps the fuzziness is more apparent than real and a function of language-specific syntactic and lexical choice – selections from the MOOD systems – rather than a flaw in the notion of the universal proposition; the product of choices made in the system of

TRANSITIVITY.

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