Categorizing possession in Zuanga-Yuanga and other Kanak languages (New Caledonia)

A typological perspective

Bibliographic Data

ID10292604
AuthorsIsabelle Bril (0000-0003-4582-9755, CNRS – LACITO , Villejuif , France, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume61
Issue6
Pages1403-1446
Publication date2023-11-27
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ling-2022-0035
OpenAlexW4388493801
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited26

Like many other Oceanic and Kanak languages of New Caledonia, Zuanga-Yuanga [ZY] has classifiers restricted to the possession of nouns denoting food, drink, animals and plants; it also has dichotomous direct and indirect adnominal possessive constructions, which are generally labeled inalienable or alienable in the Oceanic literature. These terms refer to a distinction between close versus distant structural marking, which do not strictly correlate with lexical-semantic categories. For instance, kinship nouns are split over the two types of constructions, distinguishing reference from address kinship terms, not in terms of semantic distinctions between close versus distant kinship types. The split for body-part nouns is between directly possessed dedicated terms and indirectly possessed metaphorical body terms, not in terms of permanent versus removable parts, or temporary body properties. In ZY possessive constructions correlate with fairly strict possessee noun classes belonging to one single structural class (directly or indirectly marked). Only a limited number of nouns denoting parts-of-whole have alternate constructions expressing different semantic relations to the possessed noun

Class (philosophy) · Genitive case · Kinship · Linguistics · Noun · Perspective (graphical) · Possession (linguistics) · Possessive · Proper noun · Semantic property · Sociology · Anthropology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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