Publications

Publication details [#16830]

Hill, Deborah and Cliff Goddard. 1997. Spatial Terms, Polysemy and Possession in Longgu (Solomon Islands). Language Sciences 19 (3) : 263–275.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
Elsevier
ISBN
0388-0001

Annotation

Lexical exponents of the proposed semantic primitives ABOVE, UNDER, INSIDE and ON THE SIDE are identified in Longgu (Solomon Islands). It is argued that the first three of these exponents are polysemous between a semantically primitive relational sense and a secondary topological sense. A number of issues relating to the morphosyntax of the exponents are discussed, including their status as `local nouns', the significance of the fact that their basic syntactic frame employs the same system of person-number agreement suffixes as the inalienable possession construction, and the difference between this basic frame and a rarer `associative construction'. There is also a brief discussion of the status of the hypothetical primitive 'ON' in Longgu.