Dapiica: Possession and Copula
Two new sections in the Dapiica page:
- A section about how possession works. Possession is perhaps surprisingly complicated - there are several different ways to indicate possession, which each have various grammatical consequences.
- A section about the Copula. This section is perhaps misnamed - “the copula” typically refers to a word, whereas in dapiica it is a circumclitic.
As I mention on the page, the circumclitic is unique to dapiica. I don’t provide any proof that it is a circumclitic on the actual page, however, so I decided to do it here.
In order for it to be a circumfix, the prefix part must be present if the suffix is present, and visa versa. This is fairly trivial:
- ŋiibananiʔoba
- ŋiiɸuumoba
- ŋiicaʃtidiβoba
Every instance has both - if we made a list of every word w which could be in the sentence “There is/There are w”, we would translate that as ‘ŋii(ʔ)w(ʔ)oba’. So, in the case of a single word, we can see that it behaves like a circumfix.
In order for a morpheme with the form of an affix to be a clitic, it must syntactically behave like a word. This can be shown with the first example on the page:
- ŋiidapiica dacaponoba
We see that the second half of the morpheme has moved to a different part of the sentence, thus it behaves like a word.
Feedback
If you spot any mistakes anywhere, or if an explanation isn’t clear, please let me know! My email address can be found on the about page. I’m looking into adding a comment system of some kind, so that people can respond without having to go to the effort of writing an email, but that will take a while.