Marking of Pronominal Possessors (Feature 37)

From Apics

Feature Annotation

This feature concerns the expression of adnominal possession when the possessor is a (non-focused, non-contrastive) personal pronoun (e.g. ‘my book’, ‘her mother’, ‘your hair’). (For adnominal possessive constructions with full NP possessors, see Feature 38.)
Possession” is defined broadly as comprising ownership, part-whole relations and kinship relations (and of course normally other abstract relations as well, but these three are criterial.)
Personal pronouns expressing possessors are typically called possessive pronouns. They may be separate words (preceding or following the possessum, values 1-2), or affixes (prefixes or suffixes) on the possessum (values 3-4). Another possibility is that pronominal possessors are linked to the possessum by an adposition, with the adpositional phrase preceding or following the possessum (values 5-6).
Note that possessive pronouns need not be specialized: For this feature, it is irrelevant whether they are identical to personal pronouns/verbal person-number affixes, or whether they have special shapes.
If there are several different constructions for pronominal possessors, you may select several values.

Additional remarks

Note that the March 2008 version contained an error for this feature: instead of possessum the text erroneously had possessor in four cases.

Values

Value		Value Annotation
1	Preceding word	Papiamentu bo kas ‘your house’
2	Following word	Principense kaxi tê ‘your house
3	Prefix	Macushi (Cariban) u-pana ‘my ear’
4	Suffix	Quechua wasi-yki ‘your house’
5	Adpositional marking, preceding the possessum	Belizean Creole [fu dem] mone ‘their money’
6	Adpositional marking, following the possessum	Bislama grup [blong mifala] ‘our group’, Ternate Chabacano el manga iha [di eli] [the PL daughter of him] ‘his daughters’
7	Other	(Please give details in the “General comments” field.)

WALS No.

(24, 57) (Partial)