Highly grammaticalized forms have primarily a structural function rather than a meaning.In many languages, the paradigm of pronominal indices cross-referencing the subject is identical with the paradigm of indices cross-referencing the possessor. For instance, ‘I sleep’ has the same pronominal form as ‘my sleep’. In Yucatec Maya, this is true of an entire paradigm of pronominal clitics dubbed paradigm A ().

This is generally amenable to a (synchronic or diachronic) structural account: the verbal constituents whose subject is thus marked are or were nominalized. It would be wrong to interpret the situation in terms of a possessive meaning of the subject relation, so that the construction of ‘I sleep’ “really” means ‘my sleeping’ or even ‘I am the possessor of a process of sleeping’.¹

More generally, this is a caveat against premature conclusions concerning linguistic relativity, which are meant to show how differently speakers of different languages think. At the end of a grammaticalization scale, the meaning of the original construction has been bleached completely. If speakers were actually to conceive a literal interpretation of the structure of their utterances, they would have to do etymology.

¹ This is done throughout in the Lacandon grammar of Bruce S. 1968.