This dissertation provides a comparative study on the rationale of publicity in the law of corporeal movables and claims. It examines possession, notification, and documental recordation as a means... Show moreThis dissertation provides a comparative study on the rationale of publicity in the law of corporeal movables and claims. It examines possession, notification, and documental recordation as a means of publicity by paying attention to English law, German law, and Dutch law. In this dissertation, a system of registration is argued to be introduced in the transaction concerning corporeal movables and claims. In the end, some proposals are made for Chinese law. Show less
This paper investigates variation in possessive marking in Abui, a language spoken in a minority bilingual community in eastern Indonesia. Abui youngsters grow up acquiring both Abui (Papuan) and... Show moreThis paper investigates variation in possessive marking in Abui, a language spoken in a minority bilingual community in eastern Indonesia. Abui youngsters grow up acquiring both Abui (Papuan) and Alor Malay (Austronesian), but only become active speakers of Abui when they reach adolescence. Due to this delay, their Abui is expected to show signs of both imperfect acquisition and contact-induced effects. This language background makes them an interesting population on which to carry out a cross-sectional study on contact-induced variation. Abui distinguishes between a reflexive and non-reflexive possessive marker, while Alor Malay makes no such distinction. Combining methods from descriptive linguistics, bilingualism research, and variationist sociolinguistics, and using both a production and a comprehension task, we study the variation between four age-groups of Abui-Malay bilinguals: (pre-)adolescents, young adults, adults, and elders. Our results reveal that (pre-)adolescent males are the drivers of variation, and generalize the non-reflexive possessive marker to reflexive environments. This suggests that over the next decades the reflexive possessive prefix may be lost in Abui. This paper is a direct answer to a call by Ross (2013) to conduct in-depth variationist studies to establish more synchronically informed approaches to the study of language contact. In addition, by combining production and comprehension studies and applying them to an indigenous minority language, it expands the empirical support for a prominent hypothesis of bilingual processing: the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White 2000b). Show less
This dissertation concerns the description of possessive constructions in Tongugbe, one of the many dialects of the Ewe language, which is spoken in south-eastern Ghana, along the Volta River.... Show moreThis dissertation concerns the description of possessive constructions in Tongugbe, one of the many dialects of the Ewe language, which is spoken in south-eastern Ghana, along the Volta River. It presents a detailed description of the constructions; and explores the relationship that exists between clausal possessive constructions and locative and existential constructions. In addition to this, the work presents a first outline grammar of Tongugbe. The grammar presents notably preliminary findings on the duration contrast in tones of Tongugbe and a rich demonstrative paradigm. The possessive constructions can be grouped into attributive, predicative and external possessor constructions. It is shown that the structural configurations of attributive possessive constructions are functionally motivated. It is also demonstrated that structural variations in predicative possessive and external possessor constructions correspond to differences in meaning. Finally, it is argued that, synchronically, clausal possessive constructions and locative and existential constructions are not reducible to a single structure. The view supported here then is that each construction is a form-meaning pair. Show less
This paper discusses two particles that mark possession in Ishkashimi: -no and-noy. These markers are not in free variation; -noy can only mark adnominalpossession, while -no can mark external... Show moreThis paper discusses two particles that mark possession in Ishkashimi: -no and-noy. These markers are not in free variation; -noy can only mark adnominalpossession, while -no can mark external possession. This will be argued foron the basis of distributional and interpretational differences between the twomarkers. Unlike the marker -noy, -no can appear in the context of nominal ellipsisand possessive predicates. A -noy-marked possessor has to be adjacent to thepossessed noun and precede it; a -no-marked possessor does not have these adjacencyrequirements. In the context of possessor doubling, -noy is only compatiblewith 3rd person. In the case of negation, when the existence of the possessedis denied, only the -no marker is licensed. The differences in the distribution ofthe two markers correlate with their morphological differences; unlike -no, -noyis morphologically complex and encodes the person of the possessor. Show less
