Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

Papiamentu does not allow an unmarked possessive construction where the possessor and possessed are juxtaposed without any mark of their relationship. Instead, speakers choose between a prepositional possessive (with the preposition di) and an originally dislocated possessive, which employs what looks like a resumptive possessive pronoun preceding the possessed, but is here regarded as a postposition.

As far as I know, no quantitative study of Papiamentu possessives has been carried out. Tentatively we can say that the construction with di is more frequent.

The postpositional possessive uses su, which is also the 3rd person singular possessive pronoun. Although full NP possessors are inherently 3rd person, the occurrence of su with both singular and plural possessors shows that it has no number features.
Moreover, the occasional use of non-3rd person plural pronouns in the possessor position of this construction (e.g. boso tur su trabou [2PL all 3SG.POSS work] 'the work of all of you', Maurer 1988: 38) shows that su is essentially a marker of the possessive relationship, and has no pronominal features whatsoever – it is a postposition.

The prepositional construction, which uses the preposition di to mark the possessor, is also used to denote partitives, source relationships, etc. Moreover, it is also used to form phrasal compounds, the most productive word formation process of Papiamentu (Dijkhoff 1993). As a result, sequences consisting of N + di + N are often potentially ambiguous between a range of interpretations.

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Adpositional or case marking of possessor