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Whence the Austronesian Indirect Possession Construction?
- Oceanic Linguistics
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 47, Number 2, December 2008
- pp. 316-327
- 10.1353/ol.0.0017
- Article
- View Citation
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Possession in some Austronesian languages shows levels of elaboration far in excess of cross-linguistic norms, while in others it is strikingly unelaborated. The appearance of alienable/inalienable contrasts has been assumed to result from contact with Papuan languages, and the existence of a paradigm of indirect possessive classifiers is cited as one of the pieces of evidence for the Oceanic subgroup, while acknowledging that indirect possession constructions can be found in Malayo-Polynesian languages further west. We argue that the appearance of possessive classifiers in these languages is also the result of contact with Papuan languages west of New Guinea.