Papuan linguistics

This is a grammatical description of the Papuan language Iatmul. It is based on almost fourteen months of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, distributed over four trips in 2005/2006, 2007, and 2008. The structure of the book is as follows: Chapter 1 presents the language, its genetic affiliation, and its typological profile; the area where it is spoken and its sociolinguistic situation; and the fieldwork setting. Chapter 2 describes the phonology. Chapters 3-8 deal mostly with morphological issues, while chapters 9-15 describe phenomena pertaining to both morphology and syntax. Chapters 16-18 are about interclausal relations. Chapter 19 discusses verb-argument relations and the order of constituents in the clause. Chapter 20 goes beyond morphosyntax and discusses two semantic areas of cross-linguistic relevance, the versatility of speech report constructions, and the extreme polysemy of certain lexical roots. Chapter 21 deals with sociolinguistic topics, strategies for lexical enrichment on the one hand, and language shift and its structural correlate, language obsolescence, on the other. The appendix includes six fully glossed, translated, and annotated texts, a short word-list, and a list of all affixes.

This is a grammar of Ma Manda, a language of Papua New Guinea, which covers major aspects of this previously undescribed language. The analysis is supported by culturally-embedded examples from a recorded text corpus. The result is a comprehensive preservation of this endangered language for its speakers, and for linguistic and anthropological scholars working in the Papuan arena.

While linguistic terminology is a meta-language used to describe object languages, it can itself be an object of study. It then becomes obvious that quite often scientific terms have semantic properties similar to those of the everyday object-language expressions they are supposed to describe. There is often a narrow and a broad definition, or a core meaning with one or more extensions. I will present a few common terms from linguistics to illustrate that linguists have not reached agreement on basic concepts.

The ‘subordinate clause’ is such a concept. For some it is defined as ‘embedding’, whereas others use it as a synonym of ‘dependent clause’; but the latter two concepts are not used univocally either. Sometimes the subordinate clause is defined as a subtype of dependent clauses, sometimes it is a subtype of embedded clauses, and sometimes it is exactly the other way round. And while some linguists stress morphological and/or syntactic criteria when describing a clause as ‘subordinate’, others focus on its semantic and discourse properties.

This conceptual confusion makes it difficult to describe the Iatmul suffix -ka, the core function of which is to mark a verb form as non-finite. It appears in a variety of contexts ranging from coordinate-like clause adjunction to simple adverbs and periphrastic inflection. These can be located on a CONTINUUM OF SYNTACTIC INTEGRATION, of which subordination and embedding occupy overlapping stretches.

A verbal inflection whose primary function is to indicate future time reference is commonly called ‘future tense’. In descriptive practice, however, such morphological markers are often polysemous or multifunctional. In the main part of this paper, I will present three descriptive case studies illustrating some of the problems involved. The choice of these three case studies – Turkish, Basque, and the Papuan language Iatmul – is motivated by the fact that they have markers that are often glossed as ‘future’ – including by myself in the past – but a closer examination will reveal that this label is problematic in all three languages. It is therefore avoided in this paper, the more appropriate labels ‘prospective’ (for Turkish and Basque) and ‘irrealis’ (for Iatmul) being advocated instead. In order to facilitate the understanding of the data, the language-specific sections 2 (Turkish), 3 (Basque), and 4 (Iatmul) will begin with a short overview of the verbal morphology of each language, limited to the aspects relevant for the subject matter of this paper. In the second part of sections 2-4, the approach is first onomasiological, that is, we start with the function and look for the corresponding structural means to express that function in a given language. In our case, this means that we single out the concept of future time reference and look for its grammatical correlates in our language sample. The structural means found through this approach will be called FUTURITY MARKERS, intended as a mere “working label” for a COMPARATIVE CONCEPT in the sense of Haspelmath (2010: 664), which can be used for cross-linguistic comparison without making any claims about the exact morphosyntactic or semantic properties of the different markers. Given that these properties are different depending on the marker and the language, the second step is semasiological (form-to-function), as we describe the polysemy and, where applicable, diachrony of the morphemes and constructions found through the onomasiological approach. Section 5 draws attention to the fact that dependent clauses can have TAM distinctions and markers different from those of main clauses. This will be illustrated with nominalized predicates in Turkish and Iatmul. The corresponding analytical and terminological issues will also be addressed. Section 6 deals with overlap and differences between prospective, future, and irrealis. We will see that the distinction between prospective aspect and future tense also depends on the extent to which a prospective construction is grammaticalized. While a present prospective can develop into a future, past prospectives tend to take over the function of counterfactual conditionals in the past. Both scenarios involve a shift from realis to irrealis status. This will be illustrated by strikingly parallel phenomena in Turkish and Basque. Section 7 will sum up the discussion. First of all, we should observe a distinction between futurity markers and future tense markers. If we follow the argumentation in Haspelmath (2010: 671), a given language would then have futurity marking as a (cross-linguistic) comparative concept, but it would not have future tense as a (language-specific) descriptive category. This is comparable to those languages that use verbs (as defined by language-internal criteria) “as” adjectives (in the sense of a comparative concept). We will see in this paper that Turkish and Basque use their aspect categories, and that Iatmul (and English) use language-specific modal markers to express a cross-linguistic category future (tense/time). However, aspectual, temporal, and modal markers are connected by grammaticalization scales, so that in addition to language-internal structural criteria, we also have to take into account that tense markers may develop from aspect markers. All TAM marking contributes to the SITUATION PERSPECTIVE, where zooming in corresponds to the individuation of the predicate, analogous to the referential individuation of participants.

This is the seventh addendum to my manifesto "Rapid Progress in the Genetic Classification of the World’s Languages ". It contains a list of almost 200 useful books I've collected about the world's Language families. It is obviously not exhaustive, and it includes books only (not papers or online resources).

THIS IS AN EARLY DRAFT OF THE PAPER AND NOT THE FINAL VERSION. PLEASE GO TO http://www.revue-archipel.fr/revues/archipel90.html TO GET THE FINAL VERSION OF THE PAPER.

This paper defines a Wallacean linguistic area occupying almost the same geographical area as the zoological area of Wallacea. Just as zoological Wallacea is a complex zone of transition between two distinct faunal types, Asian and Australian, so Linguistic Wallacea straddles two quite different linguistic regions, Austronesian and Papuan. Despite their diversity, however, both the Austronesian and the Papuan languages of Wallacea display a shared set of features which distinguishes them both from the Austronesian languages to their west, and from the Austronesian and Papuan languages to their east. The nature and dispersal of the features shared by Wallacean languages indicates that in prehistoric times, prior to the Austronesian language dispersal, a large part of eastern Indonesia was already inhabited by seafaring, agricultural peoples speaking Papuan languages.

The classification of languages as Austronesian is sometimes carried using a rather generous view of cognacy. A few well-known PMP cognates and a perception that an island was uninhabited prior to the Oceanic expansion have often allowed linguists to assign languages to Austronesian without serious historical argument. Blust has drawn attention to Kokota and the Whiteman languages, but this is clearly also a problem for the languages of Vanikoro and Utupua, small islands in the Southern Solomons. These languages show very limited cognacy with proto-Oceanic, and often with irregular correspondences. If they are Oceanic, they have certainly developed in ways quite at odds with almost everything we know about diversification in Austronesian. However, there is no archaeological evidence for prior settlement, so this cannot be a situation of language mixture such as may be the case in the Solomons. A possible explanation for this is these languages result from intensive interaction with a variety of NAN languages in the Oceanic homeland, and that the early canoes carrying settlers had crews already representing an ethnic and linguistic mosaic, which was transferred to the new settlements. The paper also considers if a similar model makes sense for other problematic languages in the region.

The author uses a 'canonical' approach to offer a new perspective on the complex phenomenon of inflectional classes. This means extrapolating from what there is to what there might be, in order to define the theoretical space into which real instances fit. To do this, the author proposes eight criteria, grouped under two overarching principles. These are: I. distinctiveness: canonical inflectional classes are as clearly distinct as possible; and II. independence: the distribution of lexical items over canonical inflectional classes is unmotivated. The author investigates the various deviations from these principles, by considering in turn the more detailed criteria which exemplify them. While one might reasonably expect that 'canonical inflectional class' is an ideal without exemplars, the author finds an example which comes remarkably close to canonical.

The plosive inventory includes both voiceless and voiced plosives at the bilabial, alveolar, and velar places of articulation. (See below for discussion of the glottal stop.) The voiceless stops lack any significant aspiration. Voice onset time is close to zero for word-initial voiceless stops. In intervocalic position more aspiration may be present, though voice onset time is typically less than 15% of closure duration. Voiced stops are fully voiced throughout. Place of articulation and voicing contrasts in stops are indicated in the following examples.

This thesis presents a description of the phonology, verbal inflection, possessive constructions and the expression of spatial relations in the language of Hewa. Hewa is a variety of the Austronesian language Sika spoken on the island of Flores in Eastern Indonesia. The description of the phonology argues for a phonemic glottal stop in all positions and breathy allophones of vowels in word initial position. The analysis of verbal inflection points out that verbal inflection in Hewa is bound to stems with initial vowels or voiceless stops. However not all verbs that meet these phonological criteria are necessarily inflectable. The inflection is realised in the initial phoneme of the inflected verb. This thesis shows that in possessive constructions constituent order is mainly driven by the nature of the possessor. A pronominal possessor follows the noun whereas a nominal possessor precedes the noun. The possessive suffix -n appears on the possessor pronoun or on the possessed noun. Spatial language in Hewa is characterised by the frequent use of absolute spatial terms as prepositions and adverbs. These terms are based on environment specific coordinate systems and point to absolute directions in space. By discussing these aspects in the language of Hewa, it is argued that the language presents cross-linguistically unusual features and has potential for further research.

This booklet contains a Iatmul–English dictionary based on my fieldwork research in Korogo (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea) in May 2005 and from October 2005 to June 2006.
The dictionary entries are presented in the alphabet that I designed to write the Iatmul language. Although the writing system is based on previous attempts to write the language, I had to make a few modifications. Most of these were discussed with and approved by Iatmul speakers. An overview of the sounds and the spelling is given in the section ‘The Iatmul Writing System’. The first part of the dictionary is arranged according to the order of the letters in the English alphabet. In the second part, nouns from the same semantic domain are grouped together. The first part helps to look up Iatmul words. The second part helps learners to get acquainted with words that are related to each other by
meaning.

This paper discusses the morphosyntax of valency in Nen, a language of the Yam family of Southern New Guinea, with particular reference to the interactions between case morphology and verbal agreement (up to two arguments indexed). It is based on the set of predicates investigated in the Leipzig Valency Project.

Winner of the 2013 ALT Gabelentz Award --- Mian is a non-Austronesian (‘Papuan’) language of the Ok family spoken in the Highlands fringe in western Papua New Guinea. Mian has approximately 1,400 speakers and is highly endangered. This grammar is the first comprehensive description of the language. It is based on primary field data consisting of a text corpus that covers different genres of the oral tradition, namely myths and ancestor stories, historical accounts, accounts of the initiation ritual, conversations, and procedural texts. The corpus was recorded by the author during a total of eleven months of field work from 2004 to 2008. The book provides a thorough description of all areas of Mian grammar and gives an in-depth analysis of many points of typological interest, such as the complex system of lexical tone, the interaction between a gender system and a system of classificatory prefixes on verbs of object movement, manipulation or handling, which allows the highlighting of certain characteristics of a referent in a given situation, the complex verbal morphology which allows fine-grained tense-aspect-mood distinctions, and a switch-reference system in which switch-reference suffixes on medial verbs are homophonous with and derived from suffixes functioning as tense and aspect markers in final verbs. The book is rounded off by a collection of traditional and contemporary texts (fully glossed and translated) and a word list comprising some 1,600 items, giving lexical tone, word class and meaning.

The languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar (TAP) are notable for their object agreement prefixes. Previously, this has been highlighted because this exists largely without subject agreement (a rare pattern crosslinguistically; Klamer 2014, Siewierska 2011) and the proliferation of different prefix series and the semantics they express (Fedden et al 2014, 2013, Kratochvíl 2011, inter alia). One particular feature has not raised much comment, despite its rarity and difficulties it raises for syntactic theory (Chumakina & Bond 2016): object agreement is only obligatory for a lexical class of transitive verbs.
This is particularly unfortunate since classes defined in the same way are a feature of many Trans-New-Guinea (TNG) languages, the prefixing class labelled object verbs, even being reconstructed to the protolanguage (Suter 2012). They exist in a number of non-contiguous groups of families: Dani; Ok and Anim; Kainantu-Goroka and Finisterre-Huon. These languages have dealt with this uninflectability in different ways, through support verbs, that resemble auxiliaries, or free object pronouns. What they all share are cognate agreement prefixes based on the TNG pronominals (see Suter 2012 cf: Ross 2005). The TAP languages also look to have object verbs defined by prefixes that may well be derived from these same pronominals.
This connection between the TNG and TAP is especially significant since the pattern is crosslinguistically rare. This implies that it is unlikely to have been caused by chance. This provides important extra evidence of TNG-TAP interconnectedness. Moreover, it is a serious question whether these lexical verb classes would likely be diffused and apply to the whole transitive verbal lexicon of TAP (conjugation classes are not likely to be recombinantly borrowed; Panov 2015, Koutsoukos 2016, or even Robbeets 2015, 2017). This may leave inheritance as the most probable explanation for why object verbs are found in both TAP and TNG. This would then add to the growing evidence for the TNG descent of TAP.

The Bunaq are a Papuan language-speaking people straddling the border of Indonesian West Timor and independent East Timor. This paper looks at the history of the Bunaq as a ‘border’ people in Timor. ‘Border’ is interpreted here in two ways, as referring to: (i) a political division, the boundary line separating one country from another, and (ii) a linguistic division, the distinguishing line between Papuan and Austronesian languages. I examine the effect that the Bunaq position at the political and linguistic borders of Timor has had on the people and their language.

The impersonal experiencer construction is well known among the Papuan languages of New Guinea, regularly appearing in typological descriptions (Foley 1986; Foley 2000). This has two regular features: an idiomatic nominal as a possible subject and an experiencer formally coded as an object. In one particular Trans New Guinea language, Yagaria of Eastern Highlands, this is true only on the surface; other parts of the grammar reveal this experiencer to be a subject like any other. There is some evidence this mismatch of behaviour and form derives from an earlier stage of the language where the experiencers were unequivocal objects. This development from object to non-nominative subject meets the suggestion of Cole et al. (1980). There is, however, a significant difference from the instances previously described. This is the presence of noun-verb complex predicates. This has allowed the idiomatic nominal to be reanalysed as part of the predicate and lose its subjecthood. Thus this was not just a change in grammatical relations: the erstwhile transitive clause was reanalysed as intransitive and the experiencer, the only argument, as subject. Both these noun-verb complexes and the impersonals themselves are modelled in the formal syntactic framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (Bresnan 2001).

The article presents the first survey of grammaticized evidentiality in a cluster
of languages spoken in Papua New Guinea, including the Ok-Oksapmin,
Duna-Bogaia, Engan, East and West Kutubuan, and Bosavi families. We compare
certain features of these languages and outline how they contribute to
the typological understanding of evidentiality. Findings concern the underexplored
category of participatory evidentiality, the morphological form of direct
versus indirect evidentials, relationships between person, information source,
and time, and complex treatments of the “perceiver” role implied by evidentials.
The systems of the area are rich and varied, providing great scope for
further descriptive and typological work.

This paper discusses differential argument realization in Abui, a Papuan language (Eastern Indonesia) with semantic alignment (in terms of . The paper examines the roles of volitionality, referential hierarchy, and specificity in differential argument realization (employing light verbs and pronominal co-indexing) and shows that their effects are observable throughout the argument realization system and can be therefore considered the counterpart of differential case marking (DOM/DSM) reported for syntactically aligned, casemarking languages and others). Although Abui differential argument realization correlates with the referential hierarchy , verbal subclasses (in terms of Tsunoda's 1985: 388 affectedness hierarchy) determine whether differential argument realization appears or not (cf. von Heusinger and Kaiser 2011). The paper also considers the diachronic origins of differential argument realization in Abui. Most constructions are argued to originate from two-clause constructions, such as topic/focus constructions gradually merging into single-clause structures. Information-structure related morphemes (light verbs in Abui) serialize with lexical verbs. The process starts with 1 st and 2 nd person participants (interlocutors) and may extend to human or human-like third persons. Grammaticalization ends in the fusion of the light verb and pronominal prefix, creating new pronominal paradigms, as manifested in several central Alor-Pantar languages (Kratochvíl et al. 2011).

Papua Barat adalah salah satu Wilayah yang Belum Berpemerintahan Sendiri (Non Self Governing Territories) berdasarkan Resolusi Majelis Umum PBB No. 448 tanggal 12 Desember 1950 yang berada dibawah Administering Power Kerajaan Belanda sejak 1945 - 1962 kemudian ditransfer administrasinya ke Indonesia melalui suatu Referendum ilegal yang disebut PEPERA tahun 1969 kemudian Indonesia tidak melaporkan proses Self Government setiap tahun di Sidang Umum PBB sesuai Piagam PBB Pasal 73e

In this paper, we seek to draw attention to Malayo-Polynesian languages outside of the Oceanic subgroup with innovative bases and complex numerals involving various additive, subtractive, and multiplicative procedures. We highlight the fact that the number of languages showing such innovations is
more than previously recognized in the literature. Finally, we observe that the concentration of complex numeral innovations in the region of eastern Indonesia suggests Papuan influence, either through contact or substrate. However, we also note that sociocultural factors, in the form of numeral taboos and conventionalized counting practices, may have played a role in
driving innovations in numerals.

The verbal cross-reference paradigm in the Papuan language Tobelo is here shown to pattern as an active-stative system of grammatical relations, based on an aspectual distinction between dynamic and time-stable predicates. Thus, grammatical relations in Tobelo behave quite differently than those in other split intransitive systems which base verbal cross referencing on semantic properties of the participants. Although Durie (1988, 1994) has found evidence for split intransitive patterns in Acehnese (Austronesian) discourse, evidence from Tobelo narrative discourse studies presented here provides no indication of an active- stative preferred argument structure in Tobelo. The central argument of this thesis is that the observed difference between Tobelo and Acehnese discourse patterns results directly from the lexical semantic structure of the predicates used to introduce new participants in the two languages. Both languages tend to introduce new participants as non-volitional arguments of intransitive verbs. However, due to the differing semantic bases of split intransitivity in the two languages, these non-volitional arguments receive different grammatical coding in each of the two languages. Thus, lexical semantics is responsible both for the apparent correlation between Acehnese grammatical relations and discourse patterns and for the lack of such correlation in Tobelo. This study suggests that lexical semantics plays an important role in mediating preferred argument structure in languages with split intransitive systems of grammatical relations.

The wider genealogical affiliations of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages have been the subject of much speculation. These languages are surrounded by unrelated Austronesian languages, and attempts to locate related languages have focused on Papuan languages 800 km or more distant. This chapter draws on typological, pronominal, and especially lexical evidence to examine three hypotheses regarding the higher-level affiliations of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages: (1) the languages are related to the North Halmaheran (West Papuan) languages; (2) the languages are part of the Trans New Guinea family; and (3) the languages are related to the West Bomberai family, with no link to Trans New-Guinea more broadly. We rely in particular on recent reconstructions of proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar vocabulary. Of the hypotheses evaluated here, we find the most striking similarities between TAP and the West Bomberai family. However, we conclude that the evidence currently available is insufficient to confirm a genealogical relationship with West Bomberai or any other family, and hence, TAP must be considered a family-level isolate.

This chapter presents an in-depth analysis of numeral forms and systems in the Alor-Pantar (AP) languages. The AP family reflects a typologically rare combination of mono-morphemic 'six' with quinary forms for numerals 'seven' to 'nine', a pattern which we reconstruct to go back to proto-AP. We focus on the structure of cardinal numerals, highlighting the diversity of the numeral systems involved. We reconstruct numeral forms to different levels of the AP family, and argue that AP numeral systems have been complicated at different stages by reorganisations of patterns of numeral formation and by borrowings. This has led to patchwork numeral systems in the modern languages, incorporating to different extents: (i) quaternary, quinary and decimal bases; (ii) additive, subtractive and multiplicative procedures, and; (iii) non-numeral lexemes such as 'single' and 'take away'. Complementing the historical reconstruction with an areal perspective, we compare the numerals in the AP family with those of the Austronesian languages in their immediate vicinity and show that contact-induced borrowing of forms and structures has affected numeral paradigms in both AP languages and their Austronesian neighbors.

This chapter compares numeral classifiers in Tobelo (ISO 639-3 tlb, North Halmaheran) and Western Pantar (ISO 639-3 lev, Timor-Alor-Pantar), two genealogically unrelated Papuan outliers spoken in East Nusantara. While both languages make extensive use of numeral classifiers, the number of semantic categories delineated by these classifiers is much more restricted in Western Pantar. Moreover, the two languages carve up semantic space quite differently. The languages also differ in terms of grammaticization of numeral classifiers. In this respect Western Pantar classifiers behave much more like lexical items, retaining lexical denotation alongside their classifier function. In contrast, Tobelo classifiers are generally obligatory and may have no independent lexical use.