Está Alejado Mío. On the Possessive Complement in the Adjectival Domain

This work focuses on the description of the adjectival predicates that allow the substitution of their governed prepositional complement with a possessive tonic pronoun: Está alejado de mí ~ Está alejado mío. These predicates, formed with estar and other verbs, take adverbial adjectives (cercano, lejano, próximo) and adjectives derived from verbal participles (alejado, separado, junto). They exhibit common grammatical traits, such as the symmetrical relationship, as well as the expression of the direct experiences of individuals. As complex predicates, they are also the result of a process of cocomposition. The available data shows that the retrieved examples are mostly related to youth speech from various Spanish-speaking countries. On the other hand, these adjectives take possessive pronouns of all grammatical persons (mío, tuyo, suyo), but with a preference towards the first and second person. Thus, we offer an account of an innovative construction, that follows the pattern of adverbs and verbs with alternations between their prepositional and possessive complements.