L'expression de L'espace en Basque: À Propos du Génitif et de L'inessif

This paper deals with the expression of static localization in Basque. It proposes an analyzis of two spatial inflectional cases — genitive and inessive — bringing to the fore that their interpretation heavily relies on functional notions. The fact that Basque makes use of two distinct genitives (respectively locative and possessive) reveals the existence of an underlying categorization of entities into three classes. We show that the distribution of these genitives calls for the functional notions of "usual attachment" and "location function". This last notion allows us to better characterize the entities that can be conceptualized as "places". As regards the inessive case, we show that its interpretation can as well be explained in terms of functional notions such as containment, support and meronomic relations.