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Removing the Owner: Non‐Specified Possessor Marking in Arawak Languages *
Author(s) -
Aikhenvald Alexandra Y.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/stul.12158
Subject(s) - suffix , linguistics , polysemy , noun , nominalization , computer science , selection (genetic algorithm) , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , philosophy
In most Arawak languages, obligatorily possessed nouns are bound forms. They have to be accompanied by a possessor. If the possessor is unknown or irrelevant, the noun will take the non‐specified possessor suffix. A suffix of the same segmental form occurs in deverbal nominalizations with unspecified arguments, or as a nominalizer on verbs. We hypothesise that the non‐specified possessor suffix was originally a feature of obligatorily possessed nouns denoting body parts and a selection of culturally important items (including ‘house’) but not kinship terms. The common Arawak polysemy of a non‐specified possessor marker and a nominalizer, reconstructible for the proto‐language, appears to be cross‐linguistically rare.