For example, the expression in English, was writing contains separate verbs, was and made. But if a verb plus the Te morpheme is a verb phrase, it is not clear what is the syntactic status of the morpheme. The constructions grouped under the name 'Possessor Ascension' are physically similar, easily confused in non-diagnostic contexts, yet in reality each has its own fingerprint cluster of properties, recurrent and recognizable across languages. Here I focus on only one of the 'External Possession' structures, the type instantiated in these examples from Southern Tiwa, a Tanoan language known to linguists mainly from the corpus compiled by Barbara Allen, Donna Gardiner, and Donald Frantz. Taken together, these are the ingredients of what I judge to be a useful account of noun incorporation and its relation to 'External Possession', a link now widely recognized.
Common nouns are predicates.
Noun predicates are uniformly unaccusative. For instance, 'they are cats' is an unaccusative clause in which the predicate 'cats' initializes as a 2 the referring element 'they'. This analysis can be readily expressed in the formalism of Relational Grammar, which is good at representing multi-predicate clauses. Because that is the normal position for an innermost serial predicate in this language. I'm convinced that this analysis is a major advance over the Possessor Ascension view, in which every one of the trademark cluster of properties is simply an observation calling for a stipulation.