Volume 76, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Possession in the languages of Wallacea; Issue Editors: Emily Gasser and Antoinette Schapper

The area between the Wallace Line and Lydekker’s Line in eastern Indonesia and East Timor has long been recognized as a transitional zone between the flora and fauna of Asia and Oceania. More recently, Linguistic Wallacea, shifted slightly eastward from Biological Wallacea, has been established as a transitional zone between the Southeast Asian and Melanesian linguistic types. This volume focuses on grammatical systems of possession in Linguistic Wallacea, discussing both Austronesian and Papuan languages of the region. Typical traits include Possessor–Possessum word order and alienability contrasts, among others. The cross-familial distribution of these features suggests longstanding language contact throughout the area with borrowing both from Papuan languages into Austronesian ones and vice versa.

This article presents a typological survey of patterns of adnominal possession in 85 Austronesian and Papuan languages of Linguistic Wallacea, providing a more granular picture of possessive constructions in the region than previously available. The features treated are possessive word orders, locus of possessive marking, possessive classification systems, and multifunctionality of adnominal possessive markers. Unlike their relatives to the west, the Austronesian languages of Linguistic Wallacea tend to show Possessor-Possessum ordering and have an alienability distinction, often instantiated through contrastive direct and indirect constructions. In terms of broad typological features, contact with and shift from Papuan languages can be shown to have caused widespread remodeling of the adnominal possessive patterns in Austronesian languages of the area. However, their distribution and formal manifestations make clear that they are not the result of a single Papuan contact event in a single Austronesian common ancestor but must go back to multiple localized contact events across Linguistic Wallacea. Subregional patterns are often found clustered in smaller groups of languages and are the result of local processes of contact and change including morphologization and morphological loss. These become apparent when tracking changes in historically related form-function pairs in possessive constructions.

This paper is a typological survey of inalienable possessive constructions in the linguistic area of Wallacea and its surrounds. In a sample of 189 Austronesian and non-Austronesian languages, 13 have a phenomenon not previously recognised in the theoretical or typological literature: Split Inalienable Coding (SIC), whereby a language has two or more possessive coding strategies that are closely or exclusively associated with expressing inalienable possession. This paper focusses on semantically conditioned splits, where minimally one strategy encodes the possession of body parts, and another the possession of kin terms. Geographically, all of the sampled languages with semantic SIC are located in Wallacea; special attention is therefore given to the development of split inalienables in this region. In most of these languages, SIC has developed very recently. I argue that there have been multiple causes of SIC: Austronesian languages are predisposed to develop SIC, due to the inheritance of a structurally defined class of kin terms that favours the distinction; and contact has also played a role in Northwest New Guinea, with SIC diffusing both across and within genealogical groupings.

Typological studies have repeatedly expressed doubt about the possibility of relative clause markers grammaticalizing from possessive markers. At the same time, cross-linguistic studies of attribution have provided substantial evidence for markers of adjectival attribution deriving from possessive markers. Given that simple adjectival attributive constructions are accepted to expand readily into relative clause constructions, there is an apparent discordance in the typological literature on the diachronic sources of their markers. Using data from the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages of south-eastern Wallacea, the present article argues that the link between possessive and relative clause markers, by way of an adjectival attributive marker, should also be uncontroversial.

This paper is concerned with the documentation, typology and diachrony of a single inflectional paradigm expressing inalienable attributive possession in Roon, a language of the South Halmahera West New Guinea subgroup of Austronesian. The paradigm in question exhibits a substantial amount of variation both within and across speakers. Formally, the paradigm is exceptional in that, in some of its variants, it makes use of an H toneme, the only attested usage of tonality in the entire language. Functionally, the paradigm is remarkable in that, in some of its variants, the possessor is distinguished not for person but rather for distal deixis. Historically, the H toneme forming part of the paradigm is argued to derive from the grammaticalization of a High Extended Intonation contour expressing excessivity along a scalar dimension, characteristic of many languages of New Guinea and Australia. In some languages of North West New Guinea, this intonation contour anchors to certain particles, resulting in ideophones such as the Papuan Malay eeeH . One such ideophone, it is suggested, was subsequently incorporated into the expression of inalienable attributive possession in Roon. The proposed analysis thus provides a case study of how intonation may develop into tone, and, more generally, how gesture may be incorporated into grammar.

This paper provides the first description of the possessive system in Patani, a South Halmahera-West New Guinea language (Austronesian). Possession in Patani involves the interplay of several parameters. Syntactically, there are two broad possessive constructions: direct, and indirect. Morphologically, both constructions make use of pronominal proclitics and possessive suffixes which express the person and number of the possessor. In the direct construction, this possessive marking attaches directly to the noun, whereas the indirect construction makes use of a possessive particle (a relational classifier) on which the possessive marking occurs. Semantically, all nouns which are directly possessed are inalienable nouns expressing kinship, part-of-whole relations, and close association. In the indirect construction, a semantic distinction is made between items related to eating and drinking on the one hand, and general possession on the other. This distinction is signaled through the choice of one of two possessive classifiers. At the same time, there are some idiosyncrasies which are not explained by the main semantic pattern. When both direct and indirect constructions are used together in a sentence, each part maps a different semantic relationship. Typologically, the Patani order is possessor-possessed, as is common in the region. Finally, both the direct and the indirect construction may be used phrasally (‘my house’), or predicatively (‘I have a house’).