Possession and Ownership

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Distinguished Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow, and Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages. Her other major publications, with OUP, include Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000), Language Contact in Amazonia(2002), Evidentiality (2004), The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea, (2008), Imperatives and Commands (2010), Languages of the Amazon (2012), and The Art of Grammar (forthcoming).R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor and Deputy Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. He has published grammars of a number of Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiñ), in addition to A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian (University of Chicago Press, 1988), The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (Oxford University Press, 2004;, paperback 2011) and A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is also the author of the three volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (Oxford University Press, 2010-12) and of an academic autobiography I am a linguist (Brill, 2011).

This volume, the result of cooperation among eminent linguists and anthropologists, is a significant intellectual achievement.

• 1. Possession and ownership: a cross-linguistic perspective ; 2. Ownership, part-whole and other possessive-associated relations in Nelemwa ; 3. Possession in Moskona, an East Bird's Head language ; 4. Possession and ownership in Manambu, a Ndu Language from the Sepik area, Papua New Guinea ; 5. Possession in Martuthunira ; 6. Possession in Nanti ; 7. Possession and association in Galo language and culture ; 8. Possessive constructions in Chinese ; 9. Possession in Hone ; 10. Possession in Lipke ; 11. Possession in Wandala ; 12. Spirits of the forest, the wind, and new wealth: defining some of the possibilities, and limits, of Kamula possession ; 13. Being and belonging: exchange, value, and land ownership in the Western highlands of Papua New Guinea ; 14. Possession and also ownership - vignettes