Hill, Deborah, & Goddard, Cliff (1997). Spatial terms, polysemy and possession in Longgu (Solomon Islands). Language Sciences, 19(3), 263-275. DOI: 10.1016/S0388-0001(96)00064-2
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.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
