Surrey Turning Owners into Actors Database: Possessive morphology as subject-indexing in the languages of the Bougainville region

A fundamental communicative task for all languages is to show which participant in a
sentence is the subject. Languages have various ways of identifying the subject,
including word-order, agreement, and case-marking. However, there is another unique
and strange method, almost entirely unknown until now, found only in
Northwest-Solomonic (NWS), a group of Oceanic languages of the Solomon Islands and
Bougainville. In some constructions, these languages indicate subject using
word-forms normally indicating possessors of nouns. This use of possessive morphology
to mark subjects is theoretically highly significant. To define language fully we
must understand the limits on subject-marking. This almost unresearched phenomenon is
crucial to our understanding of the fundamental issue of how subjects can be marked.

The Surrey Turning Owners into Actors Database comprises data on the use of
possessive morphology as subject-indexing in eight languages of the Bougainville
region: Bannoni, Halia, Kokota, Nehan, Sisiqa, Solos, Torau and Vangunu. The database
includes data on nine different grammatical phenomena related to subject indexing and
possession: independent pronouns, nominal adpositional possession, nominal direct
possession, nominal general indirect possession, nominal consumed indirect
posssession, object indexing, preverbal subject indexing, postverbal subject
indexing, and verb structure.

The database was created for the project 'Turning owners into actors: Possessive morphology as subject-indexing in the languages of the Bougainville region', funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This support is gratefully