Logo Lanfrica
  • Home
  • Atlas
  • Insights
  • Docs
  • Sign in

© 2026 Lanfrica. All rights reserved. All copyrights of the resources shown on the Lanfrica website belong to the original copyright holders, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Copulas, possession, and the temporary-permanent distinction in Mashi: Evidence for decompositional HAVE

Domain:

natural language processing

Record type:

paper
Creator:
Aro
Publisher:
Ope
Host:
It is cross-linguistically common to find a distinction between “temporary” vs. “permanent” states in copular verbs, e.g., Spanish estar and ser (see Deo et al. 2017). In Mashi [shr] (Bantu, JD53; Maho 2009), a similar temporary-permanent distinction holds not only of the two copular be-verbs in the language, -li (temporary state) and -ba (permanent state), but also of the two possessive have-verbs, -dwiire and -jira; -dwiire indicates temporary possession, while -jira instead indicates permanent possession. This parallelism provides a novel argument in favor of a decompositional approach to possessive verbs (Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993, Harley 1998). The analysis is further supported through patterns of allomorphy where HAVE is realized in its decomposed form, BE + comitative, in Mashi. I analyze the patterns using a Spanning Insertion analysis (Williams 2003, Svenonius 2012, 2016, Merchant 2015).

Visit

doi.org

Languages

MashiMashi

Licenses

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Similar

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary: Understanding protracted displacement and people's own responses TRAFIG Synthesis ReportCompound tenses in Moroccan Arabic: evidence for a decompositional approach to the syntax and semantics of clausal complementation Compound tenses in Moroccan Arabic: evidence for a decompositional approach to the syntax and semantics of clausal complementation: Springer Handbook of North African ArabicOn the Distinction between Regular and Irregular Inflectional Morphology: Evidence from Dinka‘Morphemes’ and ‘Vocabulary Items’ Distinction in Distributed Morphology: Evidence from HausaReplication data for: The Permanent Effects of Transportation Revolutions in Poor Countries: Evidence from AfricaThe permanent effects of transportation revolutions in poor countries: evidence from Africa

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary: Understanding protracted displacement and people's own responses TRAFIG Synthesis Report

Across the world, 16 million refugees and an unknown number of internally displaced p

Compound tenses in Moroccan Arabic: evidence for a decompositional approach to the syntax and semantics of clausal complementation Compound tenses in Moroccan Arabic: evidence for a decompositional approach to the syntax and semantics of clausal complementation: Springer Handbook of North African Arabic

On the Distinction between Regular and Irregular Inflectional Morphology: Evidence from Dinka

Discussions of the psycholinguistic significance of regularity in inflectional morphology generally

‘Morphemes’ and ‘Vocabulary Items’ Distinction in Distributed Morphology: Evidence from Hausa

Replication data for: The Permanent Effects of Transportation Revolutions in Poor Countries: Evidence from Africa

Jedwab, Remi, and Moradi, Alexander, (2016) "The Permanent Effects of Transportation Revolutions in

The permanent effects of transportation revolutions in poor countries: evidence from Africa

We exploit the construction and eventual demise of the colonial railroads in Africa to study the imp