Possessive morphology as subject agreement in Western Oceanic.

In most Oceanic languages of the North West Solomonic subgroup (spoken in Bougainville and the western Solomon Islands), some use is made of apparent possessive morphology to index subject and encode aspect on verbs.

Read the abstract below of a recent conference paper on this topic, or view the full text of a draft journal article.

View an earlier paper containing an earlier version of the analysis, but with more data.

Owners into actors: How possessive morphology became

subject agreement in the languages of Bougainville.

Bill Palmer 

Most languages of the North-West-Solomonic (NWS) branch of Oceanic make some use of possessive morphology to mark verbs and index subject. In Mono, for example, a distinct construction employs two separate auxiliaries carrying subject-agreement suffixes:

(1)     a.  eli      sa-ria                                                 b.  soipa   ma-mate        e-na

              dig     AUX-3PL.SUBJ                                         Soipa   REDUP-die     AUX-3SG.SUBJ

              ‘They went on digging.’ (Wheeler 1926)              ‘Soipa is dying.’ (Ross 1988:250)

The highlighted forms in (1) do not reflect Proto-Oceanic verbal morphology. Instead, they reflect nominal possessive forms, the auxiliaries reflecting classifiers distinguishing general possession (GP) and consumable possession (CP). This nominal morphology also occurs synchronically in Mono:

(2)     a.    soipa      sa-na              auau                       b.  soipa      e-na               toitoi

                 Soipa    GP-3SG.POSS    dog                             Soipa     CP-3SG.POSS    banana

                 ‘Soipa’s dog’ (modified from Boch)                  ‘Soipa’s banana.’ (Ross 1988:250)

This paper surveys this phenomenon, then considers how a functional shift from nominal-marking to verbal-marking morphology could have occurred. It argues that the construction arose through the reverbalisation of former nominalised clauses in which an event was ‘possessed’ by one of its participants.

In this hypothesis, the use of general and consumable possessive classifiers reflects a distinction in the originating nominalisations between dominant possession (possession of states or events over which the possessor has control) and subordinate possession (possession of states or events over which the possessor has no control). This distinction occurs synchronically in some Oceanic languages. In such languages, possession of nominalisations expressing controlled states and events uses general possessive morphology, while possession of uncontrolled states and events uses consumable possessive morphology, as in Fijian (Geraghty 1983):

(3)     a.  no-mu               i-vacu                              b.  ke-mu              i-vacu

              GP-2SG.POSS    DEVERBAL-punch                    CP-2SG.POSS     DEVERBAL-punch

              ‘your punch’ (which you threw)                     ‘your punch’ (which you received)

This paper presents evidence that such a distinction existed in Proto-NWS, and that the innovated construction arose when possessed nominalised adverbial clauses were reanalysed as conjoined main clauses in progressive aspect, dragging the possessive morphology with them into the verbal construction as subject-indexing. This casts light both on typological possibilities for subject agreement, and on one possible cause of diachronic functional shift in morphology.

© Bill Palmer 2004