An account of possession in Larevet

Abstract

This paper presents a first analysis of the Larevet language of central Malakula, Vanuatu, focusing on its possessive system. I locate the analysis within the literature on possession in the Oceanic language family broadly, seeking to understand how the synchronic system re- lates to both typological understandings within the family, and the possessive system recon- structed for Proto Oceanic. Drawing on a corpus of communicative and elicited language as evidence, I demonstrate that Larevet displays many features of a canonical Oceanic language, and that where changes have occurred, these align well with observations of possession in related languages of Malakula.