Verbal aspect and personal pronouns: The history of aorist markers in north Vanuatu

Among the seventeen languages spoken in the Banks and Torres groups of north Vanuatu, eleven share a TAM category whose functions include sequential, generic, subjunctive, prospective and imperfective. This aspect, labeled here “aorist”, also displays cross-linguistic formal similarities: everywhere, the aorist marker shows allomorphic variation depending on the person of the subject. After comparing the eleven languages concerned, I propose to reconstruct their protosystem as a set of four portmanteau proclitics {*gu–*u–*ni–*(k)a} combining aspect and person

In search of island treasures: Language documentation in the Pacific

The Pacific region is home to about 1,500 languages, with a strong concentration of linguistic diversity in Melanesia. The turn towards documentary linguistics, initiated in the 1980s and theorized by N. Himmelmann, has encouraged linguists to prepare, archive and distribute large corpora of audio and video recordings in a broad array of Pacific languages, many of which are endangered. The strength of language documentation is to entail the mutual exchange of skills and knowledge between linguists and speaker communities. Their members can access archived resources, or create their own. Importantly, they can also appropriate the outcome of these documentary efforts to promote literacy within their school systems, and to consolidate or revitalize their heritage languages against the increasing pressure of dominant tongues. While providing an overview of the general progress made in the documentation of Pacific languages in the last twenty years, this paper also reports on my own experience with documenting and promoting languages in Island Melanesia since 1997.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

A proposal for conversational questionnaires

This paper proposes a new approach for collecting lexical and grammatical data: one that meets the need to control the features to be elicited, while ensuring a fair level of idiomaticity. The method, called conversational questionnaires, consists in eliciting speech not at the level of words or of isolated sentences, but in the form of a chunk of dialogue. Ahead of fieldwork, a number of scripted conversations are written in the area’s lingua franca, each anchored in a plausible real-world situation – whether universal or culture-specific. Native speakers are then asked to come up with the most naturalistic utterances that would occur in each context, resulting in a plausible conversation in the target language. Experience shows that conversational questionnaires provide a number of advantages in linguistic fieldwork, compared to traditional elicitation methods. The anchoring in real-life situations lightens the cognitive burden on consultants, making the fieldwork experience easier for all. The method enables efficient coverage of various linguistic structures at once, from phonetic to pragmatic dimensions, from morphosyntax to phraseology. The tight-knit structure of each dialogue makes it an effective tool for cross-linguistic comparison, whether areal, historical or typological. Conversational questionnaires help the linguist make quick progress in language proficiency, which in turn facilitates further stages of data collection. Finally, these stories can serve as learning resources for language teaching and revitalization. Five dialogue samples are provided here as examples of such questionnaires. Every linguist is encouraged to write their own dialogues, adapted to a region’s linguistic and cultural profile. Ideally, a set of such texts could be developed and made standard among linguists, so as to create comparable or parallel corpora across languages – a mine of data for typological comparison.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Coordination inclusive et comitative dans les langues océaniennes

Les constructions inclusives sont un type de coordination asymétrique entre syntagmes nominaux. Elles sont asymétriques du fait que la référence à l'une des entités conjointes est incluse dans une forme pronominale à référence englobante et obéissant à une hiérarchie des personnes, telle que 'nous deux mon frère' pour « mon frère et moi ». Les constructions inclusives obéissent à diverses contraintes syntaxiques, sémantiques et pragmatiques. Le morphème coordonnant des constructions inclusives syndétiques est le plus souvent un coordonnant comitatif. Il se distingue de l'adjonction comitative par l'accord et la position

The lexicon of Proto Oceanic : the culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society 3: Plants

This is the second in a series of five volumes on the lexicon of Proto Oceanic, the ancestor of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family. Each volume deals with a particular domain of culture and/or environment and consists of a collection of essays each of which presents and comments on lexical reconstructions of a particular semantic field within that domain. Volume 2 examines how Proto Oceanic speakers described their geophysical environment. An introductory chapter discusses linguistic and archaeological evidence that locates the Proto Oceanic language community in the Bismarck Archipelago in the late 2nd millennium BC. The next three chapters investigate terms used to denote inland, coastal, reef and open sea environments, and meteorological phenomena. A further chapter examines the lexicon for features of the heavens and navigational techniques associated with the stars. How Proto Oceanic speakers talked about their environment is also described in three further chapters which treat property terms for describing inanimate objects, locational and directional terms, and terms related to the expression of time