A Mozart sonata and the Palme murder

This paper focuses on Swedish nominal compounds with a personal proper name as their first component (PropN-compounds), e.g. en Mozart+sonat ‘a Mozart sonata’ or Palme+mord-et ‘the Palme murder’ (‘Palme+murder-the’). Although these expressions have so far hardly appeared in the scientific discourse on possession, they do in fact constitute an important resource for expressing possession in the broadest sense in Swedish and, further, in Germanic. For instance, many PropN-compounds are more or less synonymous with nominals modified by preposed s-genitives and/or by postposed prepositional phrases, i.e. by the two constructions that make up the core of adnominal possession in Swedish. In the present paper I will be mostly interested in the structure and meanings/uses of PropN-compounds, in particular, as compared to the other “possessive” constructions in Swedish.