A note on possession and mereology in Ulwa property concept constructions

Abstract

Ulwa (Misumalpan; Nicaragua) shows a puzzling and unique pattern in which a single affix marks the head of a possessive noun phrase and appears on roots expressing property concepts. This pattern has been argued to be semantically motivated by Koontz-Garboden and Francez (2010). This paper discusses two constructions of Ulwa that do not receive a natural treatment in their analysis, potentially casting doubt on the plausibility of a semantic motivation for the syncretism. We provide a modified version of the analysis, in which property concept roots denote mereologically ordered sets of portions of substance (in the spirit of Link’s 2002 treatment of mass nouns), as argued for in Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015), rather than property theoretic ones. Possessive relations are then taken to include mereological ones. Such an analysis not only retains the motivation for a semantic approach to the syncretism, but also strengthens it, by showing that the range of interpretations available to the allegedly possessive affix is one expected of possessive lexemes more generally.