Possession in Patani

1 Introduction

Patani belongs to the South Halmahera-West New Guinea (henceforth SHWNG) subgroup of Austronesian. Although there is uncertainty concerning the exact subgrouping of SHWNG languages, it is widely accepted that Patani belongs to the South Halmahera subgroup together with the languages shown in Figure 1 below (building on Kamholz [2014]).

Figure 1:

Languages of the South Halmahera subgroup of SHWNG.

Most SHWNG languages have two broad syntactic possessive constructions: a direct and an indirect construction, the latter involving a possessive particle. On the basis of these two main constructions, a distinction is often made between inalienable and alienable nouns. Inalienable nouns in SHWNG languages generally refer to body parts, kinship terms, locative nouns, and ‘name’ (van den Berg 2009: 351). Some SHWNG languages code body parts and kin terms differently, thereby having two constructions associated with inalienable nouns (see Arnold, this issue). However, this is not attested for the subgroup of South Halmahera languages. Other SHWNG languages make a distinction between general and alimentary/edible possession among alienable nouns. In these languages, the possessive particle in indirect constructions reflects this semantic distinction and thus functions as a classifier (Gasser et al. forthcoming). Finally, it is widespread within SHWNG that the same construction can be used to express both adnominal and predicative possession, although this is highly uncommon cross-linguistically (see Section 6).

Although there are great similarities in the area of possession among the South Halmahera languages, there are a few notable differences even within this small subgroup. Taba and Gane have only one adnominal possessive construction, whereas the other SH languages have two. Furthermore, only the Central-Eastern South Halmahera (CESH) languages make a distinction between alimentary and general possession.

Until now, very little documentation has been available for Patani. A wordlist including some notes on the grammar is available in Stokhof (1980), and the paradigm of the direct possessive construction is given in Kamholz (2014). This paper is the first to describe the possessive system in Patani in detail. It shows that Patani generally patterns with the other CESH languages in the possessive system, having two broad syntactic possessive constructions: direct and indirect. Furthermore, the indirect construction makes use of a possessive classifier which signals an alimentary/general distinction. However, there are exceptions to the main pattern, and these are carefully described in this paper. Finally, comparisons with the other South Halmahera languages will be made throughout the paper.

The data upon which this paper is built consists of transcriptions of recorded natural texts, translated material from Malay, indicated by ‘(transl.)’, and elicited material, indicated by ‘(elic.)’. Most of the data were gathered during three months fieldwork in Patani Barat, but some translation and elicitation has subsequently been carried out online (through Messenger or WhatsApp). Examples from the recordings are indicated with the name of the recording (e.g. 015-BM3), as well as the relevant time. These recordings will become available in PARADISEC^[1] once my PhD project is finished. Loanwords are given in italics in glossed examples. Since all Patani speakers are also speakers of Indonesian and/or North Moluccan Malay (NMM), there are many loanwords from these varieties. Words which are found in both Indonesian and NMM are indicated as Malay for the sake of simplicity. A comma is used to indicate a pause.

This paper is organized as follows: A brief overview of the main traits of Patani grammar is presented in Section 2. Section 3 presents the main characteristics of the possessive system. Section 4 is dedicated to direct possession, and discusses formal aspects (Section 4.1) as well as semantics (Section 4.2). Section 5 deals with the indirect possessive construction, in which a distinction between general and alimentary possession is made. Nouns occurring with the alimentary classifier are the topic of Section 5.1, whereas Section 5.2 discusses nouns which are attested with both classifiers. Finally, Section 6 demonstrates that both the direct and the indirect construction can be used to express predicative possession, alongside a formally similar, designated predicative construction.

2 Patani: a brief grammatical overview

The phoneme inventory of Patani is given in Table 1 below. The orthographic representation is given in parentheses where this deviates from IPA. Additionally, Patani has geminate consonants. Orthographically, this is indicated with a double consonant. Geminate (unvoiced) obstruents occur across morpheme or word boundaries (e.g. through subject prefixation f-fan ‘2pl-go’ or vowel deletion ti ta > tta ‘that one’), whereas geminate l and nasals also occur in monomorphemic words (e.g. lollo ‘inside’, nnau ‘seawards’). The syllable structure in Patani is (C₁)(C₂)V(C₃). Across morpheme and word boundaries, epenthetic vowels (copying the vowel quality of the preceding vowel) are inserted to avoid three-consonant clusters.

Patani has little obligatory inflection, but verbs normally bear subject marking, distinguishing seven person-number combinations (cf. Table 2). Within the domain of the noun phrase, plural number is optionally marked with the plural enclitic =si. NPs may also be marked for definiteness, through demonstratives (distal ta, proximal ja), or the definite enclitic =a, which attaches to the last word in the NP. Most noun modifiers follow the head noun, but possessor NPs precede the possessed head. To illustrate this difference, examples (1)–(2) below show two possible ways of expressing ‘hen egg’ in Patani. In the noun-noun compound in (1), the modifier (‘hen’) follows the head. In the possessive construction in (2), the possessor NP precedes the (possessed) head.

The NP can also be headed by a pronoun, and the Patani personal pronouns are given in Table 2. The pronominal proclitics appearing in possessive constructions (cf. Tables 3 and 6) are clearly derived from the free pronouns.

Derivational morphology in Patani often involves partial reduplication. Nominalization is expressed through copying the onset and the coda consonant of the following syllable (CiC-), and pluractionality through copying the following coda consonant (faC-). Applicativization of verbs involves copying the vowel quality of the preceding syllable (-V). Other derivational affixes include the causatives fa- and fi-. Syntactically, Patani has nominative-accusative alignment, signaled through the subject prefix on the verb, and word order (SVO). Arguments may be elided when they are retrievable from the context.

3 Main characteristics of possession in Patani

Patani nouns can be divided into two classes depending on how they are possessed. Some nouns occur in a direct possessive construction, while all other nouns occur in an indirect construction. We may call the first class inalienable nouns, and the second class alienable nouns. The possessive marking attaches directly to inalienable nouns (hence the term ‘direct’), see example (3),^[2] whereas alienable nouns are preceded by a possessive classifier to which the possessive marking attaches (hence ‘indirect’). There are two possessive classifiers in Patani, which reflect an alimentary/general distinction. The alimentary classifier is used for items that are consumable or associated with eating and drinking. The classifiers are marked in bold in examples (4) and (5)^[3] below.

The locus of possessive marking is the possessed noun in the direct construction, and the classifier in the indirect construction. Hereafter, I use the term possessive target as a way of referring to the locus of marking across the two main constructions (direct and indirect). The possessive marking is fundamentally the same across these two main types. The marking in the examples above consists of obligatory suffixes and optional proclitics. The suffixes only occur in possessive constructions and will therefore be referred to as possessive suffixes throughout this article. Importantly, the possessive suffixes are functionally equivalent across the two syntactic constructions: they are obligatory, and indicate the person and number of the possessor. Furthermore, there is great formal similarity between the suffixes appearing in the direct and indirect constructions (cf. Tables 3 and 6).

The optional proclitics also express the person and number of the possessor, but some of these forms are attested outside of possessive constructions, e.g. attached to a verb. Compare the proclitics in (3) through (5) above to the proclitic in bold preceding the 1sg subject prefix i- and the verb sebe ‘fall’: a= i-sebe ‘I fall’ (lit. ‘1sg=1sg-fall’). I therefore refer to these as pronominal proclitics. The possessor may alternatively be expressed in the form of a free pronoun (see the bold text in 6), or a full NP (see the bold text in 10). Such preposed possessor expressions (proclitics or NPs) are extremely frequent in the material, attested in 111/115 indirect constructions and 114/120 direct constructions. However, prenominal expression of the possessor is not obligatory; compare (6) and (7), and (8) and (9). What governs the choice of preposed possessor expression is not fully known at present. As can be seen from (10), the ordering of the possessor and the possessed is Possessor Possessed when the possessor is expressed as an NP. This is also the order found in most SHWNG languages (Gasser et al. forthcoming).

The possessive marking always attaches to the possessive target, and not to any other element in the NP. This is illustrated in (11) below, where the possessive suffix (in bold) attaches to the main noun kmo ‘parent-in-law’ and not to the NP as a whole.

4 Direct possession

The following sections deal with different aspects of the direct possessive construction, both formal and semantic. Section 4.1 presents the possessive marking in direct constructions, and explains morphophonological changes in directly possessed nouns. Section 4.2 goes systematically through the semantics of directly possessed (i.e. inalienable) nouns in Patani, and shows that these mainly refer to parts of a whole or kinship relations.

5 Indirect possession

Across SHWNG, there is more morphosyntactic variation in how alienable nouns are possessed compared to inalienable nouns. A typical pattern, however, is that the possessor NP and the possessed NP are separated by a possessive particle or verb (typically of the form nV) which is inflected to mark the person and number of the possessor (Gasser et al. forthcoming). The indirect construction in Patani follows this main pattern, but unlike most SHWNG languages, the possessive particle is best described as a classifier (cf. Section 1). Possessive classifiers (general vs. alimentary) are only attested in CESH languages and Waropen. In Gebe, a South Halmahera language which is not in the Central-Eastern subgroup, there seems to have been a distinction similar to what we find in CESH, but which is now lost; both the forms ni and na are attested in the possessive system, but these are described as being in free variation instead of mapping different possessive relations (Bax 2019: 88).

In the Patani indirect possessive construction, the possessed noun is obligatorily preceded by a possessive classifier, ni or nó/na (the vowel alternation is explained in 4.1.1). As noted in Section 3, the possessive classifiers are the target of possessive marking in the indirect construction, and they thus inflect for the person/number of the possessor. Table 6 shows this inflection, i.e. the pronominal proclitics and the possessive suffixes. Note that for 1pl.excl, there is no classifier to which the possessive marking attaches.

In general, nó/na is used for items of food and drink, as well as implements used in food and drink preparation and consumption, whereas ni is used otherwise. This is exemplified in examples (27) and (28) below, where the possessive classifier is indicated in bold. However, the distinction between alimentary and general is not made with 1pl.excl possessors, as can be seen in examples (29) and (30).^[12]

The Patani classifier functions as a relational classifier in the sense of Lichtenberk (1983: 174), since the “nature of the relationship of one entity to another” may determine the choice of classifier. The relationship between a given possessor and a given possessum can vary, and therefore, the same noun can be attested with different relational classifiers. For instance, a noun such as takalé ‘chicken’ can refer both to the living bird, as well as to the meat, and Patani has the opportunity to express this difference solely through the possessive classifier. This is illustrated in (31) and (32) below, where the classifiers are given in bold.

Even though the main generalization is that the classifiers distinguish between items associated with food and drink versus everything else, it is not always clear why certain nouns are used with one classifier rather than the other. Furthermore, some nouns are attested with both classifiers without the difference in meaning witnessed in (31) and (32). The following sections list the nouns which behave differently from the main generalization, as attested in the data so far. Nouns which somewhat surprisingly occur with the alimentary classifier are discussed in 5.1, whereas nouns occurring with both classifiers are dealt with in 5.2.

6 Predicative possession

Most of the examples considered so far are instances of attributive possession, where the relation of possession is presupposed and possessor and possessum are part of the same NP. However, the possessive relation can also be the main assertion of the sentence, which is the case in the example ‘Agoes has a motorcycle’. This is an instance of predicative, or clausal, possession. The Patani possessive constructions considered so far can be used to express predicative possession as well as attributive possession. This is very uncommon cross-linguistically (Heine 1997: 25–26), but is attested in other languages in the region, e.g. in Ambel (Arnold 2018: 354) and the Yapen SHWNG languages (Emily Gasser, p.c.). Two examples of predicative possession are exemplified with the indirect construction in (38b) and (38c) below, which is taken from a recording where the speaker is describing the house we’re in by telling us what can be found there. He thus provides many examples where the possessive relation is the main assertion of the sentence.

Another example of clausal possession is given in (39) below, again with the indirect construction.

In (38) and (39), only the context determines whether the constructions in questions are interpreted as attributive or predicative. However, Patani also has designated constructions for predicative possession. These constructions are derived from the direct and the indirect construction by adding re- to the possessive target.^[14] The possessive suffixes are identical to those given in Tables 3 and 6 for the direct and indirect construction respectively. Note that a pronominal proclitic cannot occur in this construction, but a possessor NP may precede the re-prefixed possessive target, as can be seen in (40) and (41) below.

Importantly, re-constructions are never found attributively, i.e. functioning as arguments of a predicate. An example of the predicative re-construction (the indirect version) is given in the following example, which was uttered between (38b) and (38c) above. It is hard to find any difference in meaning between the re-construction in (40) and the regular possessive constructions (e.g. 38), strengthening the claim that (38b) and (38c) are indeed examples of clausal possession.

An example of the re-version of the direct construction is given below. This is a common way to ask someone if they have children.

To sum up, the direct and the indirect possessive construction can be used to express both attributive and predicative possession. However, predicative possession is commonly expressed by prefixing re- to the possessive target.

7 Summary

As most SHWNG languages, Patani has two main types of possessive construction: the direct construction, where the possessive marking attaches directly to the noun, and the indirect construction, where the marking attaches to a possessive particle. Unlike most SHWNG languages, however, the possessive particle is best described as a possessive classifier. Morphologically, the possessive marking consists of an optional pronominal proclitic and an obligatory suffix in both types of possessive construction. Nouns entering into the direct construction are called inalienable nouns as these denote parts of a whole, kinship terms, or concepts tightly associated with a person. Nouns which are directly possessed are called alienable nouns, and their relation to the possessor is signaled through one of two possessive classifiers: The alimentary classifier is mainly used with food and drinks, whereas the general classifier is used otherwise. However, some Patani nouns appear to be idiosyncratic. For example, it is not clear why some body part terms are alienable nouns, or why certain nouns are used with the alimentary classifier. However, in some instances, the use of alimentary classifier might be related to the wish to avoid sexual innuendo. Both the direct and the indirect construction can express attributive as well as predicative possession, but Patani also has designated predicative constructions, signaled by prefixing re- to the possessed noun or the possessive classifier.