Personal pronouns Possessive pronouns

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3.3.2.1.2 Compounds

Compounds, which function as a single noun, are commonly used to represent a group or class of things. One type of compound is composed of two taxonomic generics used to represent a group. 17 pants shirt ‘clothes’ It is common to combine closely associated kinship terms into a single intonation unit having one meaning. 18 H mother father ‘parents’

3.3.2.2 Pronouns PRO

Syntactically, pronouns take the place of an N constituent. In other words, they take the place of the head noun and any noun attributes. Therefore, pronouns may be followed by an emphatic marker or a contrastive marker, a number phrase, and one or more demonstratives cf. §5.2. A pronoun may also be followed by a relative clause cf. §3.3.4.1. There are three types of pronouns: personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, and reflexive pronouns.

3.3.2.2.1 Personal pronouns

Three pronouns are non-specific for number, viz. + which can be ‘1S’ or ‘1PL’, ‘3S’ or ‘3PL’, and ‘3S’ or ‘3PL’. These three are listed under both the singular 31 and plural columns. The prefix 2 cf. §3.3.1.1 is added to certain second and third person pronouns to make them plural. Only the second person pronouns specify gender. Table 5: Personal pronouns Singular Plural 1st Person + polite + polite + exclusive inclusive 2nd Person female male 2 female 2 male 2 2 female and male 3rd Person indefinite 2 indefinite Pronouns can have one of three functions in a clause: noun head, appositive, and possession. In each case, the pronoun has the same form. I have made an effort to disambiguate the sense of the word being used in a particular context using the following system, e.g. as noun head ‘1S’, as appositive ‘1S.APP’ and as possessive ‘1S.POSS’. The latter syntactic possessive construction should not be confused with possessive pronouns which make up a separate set of pronouns cf. §3.3.2.2.2.

3.3.2.2.2 Possessive pronouns

The possessive pronoun suffix is used to indicate possession or identification. 7 This possessive suffix has two forms, 2 and 2 for first person, as described in §3.3.1.1. In some cases 2 may be contracted with the preceding pronoun. This possessive pronoun suffix is separate from the syntactic possessive construction in the N cf. §3.3.2.1.1. 7 This may be comparable to the possessive particle in Chrau Thomas 1971:140. 32 Table 6: Possessive personal pronouns Singular Plural 1 st Person 2 I I 2 nd Person 2 yours male 2 yours female 2 2 yours female’ 2 2 yours male 3 rd Person 2 ‘his, hers, its’ 2 ‘their’s indefinite’ 2 ‘theirs’ 2 I + E F I Possessive pronouns often add a sense of contrast or opposition within the discourse. It can also be said to have an accusatory impact Vogel 2000:461. In the following example, the use of the possessive pronoun has an opposing force. The mother is scolding the older sister for having interfered with Jii-Mlii’s fish. The third person possessive pronoun 2 does not specify gender or number. 19 + 2222 C + 9.?J55 ‘Dont hurt what is hers’ [Fish 374]

3.3.2.2.3 Reflexive pronoun REFL