possessive marking

[Nick Evans]

Both types that have been discussed over this list in the last few days are
present in languages of Western Arnhem Land, Australia, though of different
families.

Double marking is found in Dalabon, of the Gunwinyguan family. Nouns are
optionally suffixed for possessor person and number, while possessors
normally take the genitive case, and in fact nouns can take both in
iterated possessive constructions (here ? is a glottal stop, ng is the
velar nasal and v is a high central vowel):

yabok-no      na?-ngan-kvn
sister-his/her mother-my-GEN
'my mother's sister'

Nouns divide into those always requiring a possessor-marker, basically
inalienables e.g. dje-no '(his/her)nose', and those that only take a
possessor-marker when a possessor is at issue - cf rolu '(a/the) dog',
rolu-ngan 'my dog'.

Two hundred kilometres to the north, in languages of the (only distantly
related) Iwaidjan family, possessive phrases with non-inalienables simply
juxtapose the two uninflected nouns (in either order). Giving examples from
Ilgar:

ngabi wunag            ngabi wurruwajba
1sg   country           1sg   woman
'my country'           'my wife'

The possessor noun or pronoun is in the nominative form, which covers
subjects, objects and possessors; cf ngabi ngaldalgun 'I I-cut-myself'.
A subset of inalienably possessed nouns mark the possessor by prefixation,
e.g. nga-waharl 'my head', iny-baharl 'her head'. In the case of such
nouns, the free pronoun or noun may be optionally juxtaposed, before or
after the possessed noun, e.g. (ngabi) nga-waharl 'my head', iny-baharl
wurruwajba 'the/a woman's head'.

Nick Evans

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Nick Evans
Dep't Linguistics & Applied Linguistics
The University of Melbourne
Victoria, Australia
Ph. 61 3 9344 8988
Fax. 61 3 9344 8990

http://www.arts.unimelb.edu.au/Dept/LALX/people/evans.html