This paper is intended to reconstruct the process that led to the formal opposition between the patterns
used for expressing possessive and attributive relationships in the Coptic language (Sahidic dialect).
Having explained this opposition on a synchronic level, the following questions should be answered:
What is the source of the formal likeness; How did this system develop, and what were the syntactic
and semantic preconditions for such a grammaticalization? Having identified the common source, an
additional question arises: How come the two constructions still differ, and do not show a complete
formal identity
