Details

General

Description

This affix is most commonly used on noun stems, but also has a less common, verbal variant V{-gə}V, presumably from the same morpheme {kə-}, albeit with a completely different meaning. However, their form and sandhi behaviour is the same.

The meaning of this affix can best be rendered as 'Agent has Patient as N'. This should normally be translated as 'Patient is Agents N', so this affix is used to express sentences of the form 'it is my dog', 'I am your father' etc. It combines the 'having' sense of N{-qaq}V with the 'owning' meaning of a possessive ending, which cannot be obtained otherwise. It can thus be viewed as a divalent version of the monovalent affix N{-qaq}V, or as a verbal form of a possessive ending (which it indeed in many cases will resemble). Hence we denote it the verbal possessive affix.

Note that in the sentence construction, this affix may (especially in older literature) prefer a reversal of the usual order of Subject and Object, if both are explicitly mentioned in the sentence. The usual ordering is SOV, but if the verb is constructed with this affix, the ordering may thus instead be OSV.

This affix is truncative, except on q-stems where /qg/ regularly fuse to /r/.

Verb stem

Meaning(s)