Possession in categorization across language and category

Menon & Pancheva (2014) conjecture that the roots of all property concepts (words expressing the semantic content of adjectives in English; Dixon 1982, Thompson 1989), independent of syntactic category, have an abstract mass noun semantics in the spirit of Francez & Koontz-Garboden (2015, 2017). According to this conjecture, variation in the morphosemantics of categorization masks this underlying universality, leading to superficial variation in the morphosyntax of predication within this class of words. Supporting this line of analysis, we show that morphologically transparent behavior of nouns, verbs and adjectives in Ulwa, Wá·šiw, and English reveals that despite variation in category, property concepts in these languages receive a unified analysis on the view that mass-denoting roots are categorized by nominalizing, verbalizing, and adjectivizing heads, respectively, that introduce a possessive semantics.