External possession and the undisentanglability of syntax and semantics

Over the past decades, generative attempts to understand the formal syntactic properties of the human language faculty have become unexpectedly entangled with semantics. While classical theories assumed a wide degree of autonomy for the engine of syntax in the language faculty, empirical research into argument structure, syntactic cartography and cross-linguistic alternations has nudged the field toward an understanding of syntax fundamentally linked to a core of semantic processing. Here, I investigate External Possession as a syntactic alternation, in order to fan these flames. I argue that External Possession is a formally uniform, well-motivated and non-arbitrary alternation whose unique semantics and pragmatics come hand-in-hand with its syntactic properties. This reinforces the idea that human syntax is based on a universal structure reducible in part to semantics and pragmatics. I speculate as to the nature of this structure.