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The aim of the project is to provide a clear representation of the predicative possessive constructions used in a number of Indo-European and Uralic languages of the so-called “Circum-Baltic  area” (Dahl  and Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 2001) from a typological and areal point of view.
The main research questions are: (a) how can be the semantics of possession expressed in terms that allow a cross-linguistic comparison?; (b) what are the possessive meanings that can be considered as prototypical and non-prototypical?; (c) what are the syntactic structures that are used – in a particular language – to express different possessive meanings? and (d) are there areal convergences and what are their causes?

The dissertation deals with the constructions used in Belarusian and Lithuanian to express predicative Possession. The work is written within a typological frame: the Belarusian and Lithuanian constructions are analysed in the light of the typology of the possessive predicative constructions proposed by Heine (1997). I have analysed Belarusian and Lithuanian in order to find out, which schema(ta) these two languages have chosen. The results of the research have demonstrated, that there exist a wide range of similarities between Belarusian and Lithuanian in the way they express predicative Possession. In the two languages a verb ‘have’ is found, together with other constructions, derived from other schemas, such as the adessive Belarusian construction u ‘at’ + Gen. (Location schema) or the dative case in Lithuanian (Goal schema). Both languages prefer not to use the verb ‘have’ to express experiential concepts (such as “having fear” or “having a disease”) and in physical description (“to have blue eyes”), preferring instead to use the locative or dative construction. Such similarities are shared by many languages of the area, where Belarusian and Lithuanian are spoken, the so-called “Circum-Baltic area” - they define an areal trend. Finally, the further grammaticalization of the Belarusian and Lithuanian verbs for ‘have’ into a modal and resultative auxiliary is also analyzed.