Trye, DavidCalude, Andreea S.Harlow, RayKeegan, Te Taka Adrian Gregory2024-08-222024-08-222024Trye, D., Calude, A. S., Harlow, R., & Keegan, T. T. (2024). Analysing A/O possession in Māori-language tweets. Languages, 9(8). https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9080271https://hdl.handle.net/10289/16829This article contributes the first corpus-based study of possession in Māori, the indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand. Like most Polynesian languages, Māori has a dual possessive system involving a choice between the so-called A and O categories. While Māori grammars describe these categories in terms of the inherent semantic relationship between the possessum and possessor, there have been no large-scale corpus analyses demonstrating their use in natural contexts. Social media provide invaluable opportunities for such linguistic studies, capturing contemporary language use while alleviating the burden of gathering data through traditional means. We operationalise semantic distinctions to investigate possession in Māori-language tweets, focusing on the [possessum a/o possessor] construction (e.g., te tīmatanga o te wiki ‘the beginning of the week’). In our corpus comprising 2500 tweets produced by more than 200 individuals, we find that users leverage a wide array of noun types encompassing many different semantic relationships. We observe not only the expected predominance of the O category, but also a tendency for examples described by Māori grammars as A-marked to instead be O-marked (59%). Although the A category persists in the corpus, our findings suggest that language change could be underway. Our primary dataset can be explored interactively online.en© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Attribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/A/O categoriesAotearoaNew Zealandpossessionsocial mediate Reo MaoriTwitter/XJournal Article10.3390/languages90802712226-471X47 Language, Communication and Culture4703 Language Studies4704 Linguistics4703 Language studies4704 Linguistics