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"Oceanic Languages"
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Spatial expression in Caac : an oceanic language spoken in the north of New Caledonia
In this study, the author describes the linguistic expression of space in Caac, an endangered and under-documented Oceanic language spoken in New Caledonia, from both a descriptive and theoretical perspective. Part I provides a concise description of Caac grammar, presenting a first formal portrait of this language to the reader. Part II describes the formal and semantic features of the linguistic resources available in Caac to encode spatial relationships. Part III presents the theoretical framework based on and exploring further the vector analysis developed by Bohnemeyer (2012) and Bohnemeyer & O'Meara (2012).
Book
The Tuma Underworld of Love. Erotic and other narrative songs of the Trobriand Islanders and their spirits of the dead
The Trobriand Islanders' eschatological belief system explains what happens when someone dies. Bronislaw Malinowski described essentials of this eschatology in his articles \"Baloma: the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands\" and \"Myth in Primitive Psychology\". There he also presented the Trobrianders' belief that a \"baloma\" can be reborn; he claimed that Trobrianders are unaware of the father's role as genitor. This volume presents a critical review of Malinowski's ethnography of Trobriand eschatology – finally settling the \"virgin birth\" controversy. It also documents the ritualized and highly poetic \"wosi milamala\" – the harvest festival songs. They are sung in an archaic variety of Kilivila called \"biga baloma\" – the baloma language. Malinowski briefly refers to these songs but does not mention that they codify many aspects of Trobriand eschatology. The songs are still sung at specific occasions; however, they are now moribund. With these songs Trobriand eschatology will vanish.
eBook
Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo
This paper argues that possession is syntactically category-flexible. While it is clear that in many languages possession is mostly grounded in and operates in the nominal extended projection (Szabolcsi
1983
; Kayne
1993
), I show that this cannot be universal. The empirical part of this article is a case study of Äiwoo, which I argue has an inherently verbal counterpart of English
’s
, an abstract transitive verb I label
poss
. This verb can be used by itself to form clausal possession: ‘I
poss
this boat’ ≈ ‘this boat is mine.’ Possessed DPs also contain the verb
poss
: the object of this verb is extracted, forming a relative clause. Informally, ‘my boat’ really is ‘the boat
i
’ ≈ ‘the boat that is mine.’ Given this, Äiwoo simply lacks true nominal possessives. The theoretical consequence is that possession can be mapped onto different syntactic categories in different languages. This is a welcome result, as it makes the syntax-semantics mapping as flexible as it needs to be: if possession is just a tool to assert that a certain relation holds between two entities, nothing in our theory of grammar predicts that such a notion should only be limited to a specific syntactic category.
Journal Article
Complex Sentence Constructions in Australian Languages
Over the past fifteen years, descriptions of Australian Aboriginal languages have provided important data for the typological study of morpho-syntactic phenomena. The present volume presents descriptions of complex sentence phenomena in ten Australian languages and provides important new material in this area of current concern in linguistics. Complex sentences are described either from a syntactic or from a semantic (discourse-functional) point of view. The papers draw on data from widely distributed and, in some instances, previously undescribed languages. Among others descriptions of the (so-far) poorly known non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia, as well as Pama-Nyungan languages central and northern Australia are included in this volume.
eBook
Voice and Pluractionality in Äiwoo
This paper examines the uses of the prefix e- (ye-) in Äiwoo, an Oceanic language of the Temotu subgroup. It argues that the functions of this prefix can be subsumed under the label pluractionality, and that it is a likely reflex of the Proto-Oceanic prefix ·paRi-. However, the distribution of the Äiwoo pluractional prefix is unusual in that it most common by far with intransitive position verbs; it can also occur on transitive verbs, but this is infrequent in the available data. This paper argues that this distribution is linked to the fact that Äiwoo has a distinct transitive actor voice which covers many of the typical pluractional functions with transitives. This is particularly clear when one compares Äiwoo (v)e- to its likely cognate (v)ö- in the Santa Cruz languages, which only applies to transitive verbs with detransitivizing functions; many of the functions of SC (v)ö- are covered by the actor voice in Äiwoo. The fact that Äiwoo appears to retain both a reflex of ·paRi- and an actor voice/undergoer voice distinction may provide new perspectives on the history of ·paRi-, since most Oceanic languages have lost the voice distinction; this may have led to an expansion of the functions of ·paRi-, as suggested by the comparison between Äiwoo and the Santa Cruz languages.
Journal Article
The emergence of grammatical gender: an experimental study on the loss of informative classification
Systems of grammatical gender are widespread, yet evidence on how these systems emerge is surprisingly scarce. We report on novel research using storyboard experiments in six Oceanic languages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, to probe the initial stages in the emergence of grammatical gender from possessive classifiers. This would appear to be an unlikely source, yet we can demonstrate the development and investigate it through current experiments. Our storyboard experiments were designed to reveal the use of classifiers as reference tracking devices across units of discourse and in different interactional contexts. The particular interest is in the degree to which the use of these classifiers becomes fixed and hence redundant for given nouns. The general interest is the investigation of the way in which apparently useful distinctions are lost, as transparent classification becomes opaque.
Journal Article
Comitative Constructions in Reefs–Santa Cruz
This paper describes and compares comitative constructions across the ReefsSanta Cruz languages Äiwoo, Engdewu, Nalögo, and Natügu. Each of these languages shows a complex array of constructions, with considerable variation across languages both in the forms used, in which constructions are used for genuine comitative versus depictive constructions (as in I climbed with the basket, where I am climbing but the basket is not), and in which additional functions the different constructions can be extended to. At the same time, there are commonalities across the four languages, as would be expected from a low-level Oceanic subgroup such as Reefs-Santa Cruz; but the commonalities are complex and crosscut constructions and language groupings. Our historical account of this situation takes as its starting point the ProtoOceanic comitative forms ·ma, ·ma-i, and ·aki[ni] and assumes different grammaticalization paths and functional extensions across the languages, in particular, in Äiwoo, on the one hand, and the Santa Cruz languages, on the other. We thus contribute to disentangling the complex historical relationships within this language group, which has only fairly recently been recognized as Oceanic.
Journal Article
A Grammar of (Western) Garrwa
Mushin provides the first full grammatical description of Garrwa, a critically endangered language of the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region in Northern Australia. Garrwa is typologically interesting because of its uncertain status in the Australian language family, its pronouns and its word order syntax. This book covers Garrwa phonology, morphology and syntax, with a particular focus on the use of grammar in discourse. The grammatical description is supplemented with a word list and text collection, including transcriptions of ordinary conversation.
eBook
On the Nature of Proto-Oceanic o in Southern Vanuatu (and Beyond)
The languages of Southern Vanuatu are unusual among Oceanic languages in that the default reflex of Proto-Oceanic *o is front or central and unrounded, and not back and rounded. Loan phonology also suggests that /o/ was a fairly late development in Southern Vanuatu languages. While front vowels condition “palatalization” of *t in all Southern Vanuatu languages (and of *l in some), *o also conditions palatalization in some words (though not in others). Similar but not identical developments occur in some North Central Vanuatu languages and in the Western Oceanic language Mbula. This leads into an attempt to redefine the vowel system of Proto-Oceanic, suggesting that it was not in fact the five-vowel system /*i *e *a *o *u/ currently accepted. The latter is the system that emerged in various branches after the breakup of Proto-Oceanic. The evidence indicates that Proto-Oceanic itself retained Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *ə. Depending on the chronology of the changes Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *ay > Proto-Oceanic *e and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *aw > Proto-Oceanic *o, the Proto-Oceanic system was probably one of /*i *ə *a *o *u/, /*i *e *ə *a *u/, or /*i *e *ə *a *o *u/.
Journal Article
Manner/result polysemy as contextual allosemy: Evidence from Daakaka
Manner/result polysemy describes a phenomenon where a single root can encode both manner and result meaning components of an eventive verbal predicate. It therefore poses a challenge to (i) the hypothesis of manner/result complementarity as a fundamental constraint on verb/root meaning and (ii) a strict one-to-one mapping between roots and meaning. Examining novel data from the Oceanic language Daakaka, I provide further evidence that polysemous verbs like
tiwiye
‘press manually, break’ only apparently violate manner/result complementarity, as manner and result meaning components are in complementary distribution. As both meaning components are sensitive to their morphosyntactic environment, I develop an account of contextual root allosemy, in which manner and result interpretations are associated with designated syntactic positions in relative configuration to an event-introducing verbalizer
v
. In particular, I argue that a single root may be associated with two non-compositional entries in the encyclopaedia, an eventive and a stative one, which allows the root to be merged in either the manner or result position. Independent support comes from suppletive verb forms in the paradigm of polysemous roots in Daakaka, where the spell-out conditions of contextual allomorphy and contextual allosemy overlap. Finally, I discuss theoretical and empirical challenges for alternative accounts of manner/result polysemy, including accounts based on derivation, coercion, and homophony.
Journal Article