Removing the Owner: Non‐Specified Possessor Marking in Arawak Languages*

Abstract

In most Arawak languages, obligatorily possessed nouns are bound forms. They have to be accompanied by a possessor. If the possessor is unknown or irrelevant, the noun will take the non-specified possessor suffix. A suffix of the same segmental form occurs in deverbal nominalizations with unspecified arguments, or as a nominalizer on verbs. We hypothesise that the non-specified possessor suffix was originally a feature of obligatorily possessed nouns denoting body parts and a selection of culturally important items (including 'house') but not kinship terms. The common Arawak polysemy of a non-specified possessor marker and a nominalizer, reconstructible for the proto-language, appears to be cross-linguistically rare. The problem: non-specified possession in Arawak languages 1In most Arawak languages, obligatorily possessed nouns are bound forms. They have to be accompanied by a possessor, and cannot be used on their own. If the possessor is unknown or irrelevant, the noun will take the non-specified possessor suffix. A suffix of the same segmental form occurs in deverbal nominalizations. This paper is about the distribution of the non-specified possessor marker and the corresponding nominalizer across the family.