Ways of Expressing the Possession in Portuguese and Romanian

The possession is a restrictive linguistic relation, findable in every language. The way this relation is expressed in every language is influenced by linguistic and socio-cultural factors. In the literature about this subject, there are analysed some of these factors, such as being alienable or inalienable possession and also if the possession is a human or an object. The possessive relation has a variety of forms to be expressed, which can be classified into predicative and attributive ones. The predicative "have construction" is the most usual in every language, more than the "belong construction". The attributive possessive construction is more concentrated than the predicative one and it includes possessive marks such as the Genitive case, the possessive pronoun, the possessive Dative and the possessive Accusative. There are transfers between predicative and attributive constructions such as the speakers have many choices to express the possession. This paper analyses some of these possessive expressions in Portuguese and Romanian.