Possessive Construction in Mursi

Abstract

This paper deals with possessive construction in Mursi, a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by a small group of people located in southwestern, Ethiopia. Mursi has a fairly rich syntactic system for the expression of possession or ownership. A plausible reason for acquiring such a rich expression of syntactic construction ofpossession is that it has both a head and dependent marking system. As a head-dependent marking language, both the head and the dependent are marked by appropriate dependency relation marking morphological elements. The head can be marked with two different morphologies, modification markers restrictive/nonrestrictive) and pertensive. When it is converted to possessive construction, the head is always the possessed noun (D) and the dependent/modifier is the possessor (R). The various syntactic constructions and possibilities of indicating possession/ownership should follow the syntactic frame of ‘NP-internal possessive construction’. What makes possessive construction in Mursi interesting is that the R can be an ‘intermediate possessor' or an‘intermediate modifier’, and can be explained through the notion of Construct Form (CF). Therefore, this paper aims to explore the morphology, syntax, and semantics of the NP-internal possessive constructions.