School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

To have and to hold: the semantics of the proprietive case in Australian languages

Saulwick, Adam ( 1996)

In this thesis I carry out a preliminary typological study on the semantics of the proprietive case in Australian languages. (The details on how far the proprietive is a standard case are discussed in §1.4) Throughout Australia a special proprietive is the main means of expressing the ‘have’ relation, except for a small group of languages on the Arafura coast. (Burarra, the Iwaidjic languages and Tiwi located at the very top of the country, and, most likely, some languages not covered in this survey, use alternate constructions to express proprietive semantics.) Dixon (1972) glosses an affix -yi in Dyirbal as ‘with’ and in his study or the languages of Australia (1980:322 ff.) classes it as a derivational affix. Blake (1987:77 ff.) discusses what he calls a group of ‘pre-case suffixes’ and gives solid argumentation for recognising their relational use, but withholds from attributing them with full blown case status. Dench and Evans (1988:10 ff.) clearly show that the proprietive is a productive case, with relational as well as adnominal scope, and which can derive new lexemes. In fact, the proprietive frequently functions relationally, in the same way as a typical adnominal case like the genitive.