PROPRIETIVE AFFIXES IN THE LANGUAGES OF NORTHEASTERN EURASIA: AN OVERVIEW
In Northeastern Eurasia, there are languages that do not have a possession verb ‘have’, and instead use affixation to express the possessive relation. This overview article provides an introduction to the following papers on the proprietive affixes of five languages of Northern Eurasia. The proprietives of the five languages under discussion share some semantic characteristics. They often denote not only simple possession or ownership, but also possession with a special connotation such as specialty or plenty of the possessee or ‘possession at that very moment.’ The proprietives of the five languages have morphosyntactic idiosyncrasy that ordinal derivational suffixes do not. Though the proprietives are basically derivational affixes, the base nouns may still have their autonomy. The five languages have also the abessive forms. Although the abessives are semantically contrastive to the proprietives, morphosyntactically they are not always symmetrical to the proprietives.
Keywords: Possession, proprietive, cohesive possession, abessive
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Issue: 1, 2014
Series of issue: Issue № 1
Rubric: LINGUISTICS
Pages: 9 — 14
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