concept constructions

© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Ulwa (Misumalpan; Nicaragua) shows a puzzling and unique pattern in which a single affix marks the head of a possessive noun phrase and appears on roots expressing property concepts. This pattern has been argued to be semantically motivated by Koontz-Garboden and Francez (2010). This paper discusses two con-structions of Ulwa that do not receive a natural treatment in their analysis, potentially casting doubt on the plausibility of a semantic motivation for the syncretism. We pro-vide a modified version of the analysis, in which property concept roots denote mere-ologically ordered sets of portions of substance (in the spirit of Link’s 2002 treatment of mass nouns), as argued for in Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015), rather than property theoretic ones. Possessive relations are then taken to include mereological ones. Such an analysis not only retains the motivation for a semantic approach to the syncretism, but also strengthens it, by showing that the range of interpretations available to the allegedly possessive affix is one expected of possessive lexemes more generally