External possession in Chimwiini

Abstract

Most discussion surrounding external possessors has centered around dative NPs or clitics in Indo-European or Semitic languages and focused on whether or not such structures are derived via movement. This paper examines external possessors in Chimwiini, a Bantu language that lacks datives. It will be shown that while these constructions share certain structural and semantic restrictions with their counterparts in other languages, these properties do not straightforwardly correlate with arguments for a movement or base-generation analysis. This suggests the derivational mechanics of the constructions involved are independent of the semantic restrictions placed on them.