Possession 193
In a noun phrase, gella' follows the head and indicates that the speaker is refer-
ring to an entity recently mentioned by speaker or addressee in the discourse.
This is illustrated in (55), which is minimally different from (54), but crucially
includes gella' as part of the NP and not as a clause-final verbal modifier.
(55) Reng lake' gella' entar ka Sorbaja.
person male before go to Surabaya
‘That man (we were talking about just now) went to Surabaya.’
The example in (56) shows the same usage, in this instances following a relative
clause modifier of the head of the NP.
(56) Aher-ra reng-oreng Ambunten bi' saketarra padha mendem mayyit
end-DEF REF-person Ambunten with surround same bury corpse
se dhuwa' gella'.
REL two before
‘Eventually the people of Ambunten and the surrounding area buried the
two bodies.’
5. Possession
As described in Chapter 3 section 2.4, except for first person singular, which
has a special pronominal form tang/sang, possession is typically indicated by
the affixation of the definite suffix -na followed by a nominal denoting the pos-
sessor, which may be overt or null (when the referent is recoverable from the
discourse context). The first person singular possessive pronoun is exemplified
in (57), and other instances of possession marked in the NP are in (58) - (59).^2
(57) Tang bapa' entar ka Bandung.
my father go to Bandung
‘My father went to Bandung.’
(58) Sengko' lo' maca buku-na ba'eng.
I not AV.read book-DEF you
‘I haven’t read your book.’
(^2) Speakers sometimes regularize first person possession, using sengko' ‘I’ with the defi-
nite suffix, giving forms such as bapa'na senko' 'my father'.