The possessive classifiers in Raga, Vanuatu: an investigation of their use and function in natural speech

Abstract

This article reports on the investigation of possessive constructions as they are used in a corpus of spontaneous speech collected in 2015-2017 from speakers of Raga, the Oceanic vernacular of north Pentecost, in Vanuatu. The article reveals that one specialised classifier has fallen out of use but that Raga speakers show no intergenerational variation in their use of the markers of possession and that no significant shift occurs from bound nouns to their free alternatives. The article also demonstrates that only a small number of the indirectly possessed nouns show fluidity in actual speech. Finally, complementing previous descriptions, the study provides a contextualised discussion of each Raga classifier, and in particular the valued possession classifier.