A grammar of Lewo, Vanuatu

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to present a description of aspects of Lewo, an Oceanic Austronesian language spoken on the island of Epi, Vanuatu. With this, Lewo becomes one of the few languages of the 40-member Central Vanuatu subgroup to be described in detail in recent times. Cataloguing the structure of a previously unrecorded language always contributes to linguistic knowledge. The description begins by presenting background material on the geographic, social, and linguistic setting of the Lewo-speaking community. The phonological inventory and structure of Lewo is given next, and then the grammar is treated. The approach taken is “structural-functionalist”, whereby grammatical units are described hierarchically, beginning with morpheme and word, then phrase, clause, sentence and discourse: a fairly standard morphosyntactic analysis. Traditional structural notions of constituency, contrast, variation, distribution and so on are consistently employed, but at each point, the functional significance of the linguistic units is accommodated. Besides the presentation of the structure of the language, three particular contributions of this study can be mentioned. Firstly, the analysis of the structure of Lewo has resulted in the discovery of one feature that is unique in the languages of the world, and is therefore an important contribution to language typology. It will be shown that the Lewo negative construction is a tripartite disjunctive structure, involving three distinct elements. Previously, only bipartite disjunctive structures were known, such as those found in several of the languages neighbouring Lewo. Secondly, another contribution incorporated in this study is the use of a new word-class label, the Epistememe (Durie and Mushin 1992). This innovation results from the recognition that traditional designations of the word-class often called Interrogative Pronouns have failed to take account of wider generalities that apply to the members of this class and that have cross-linguistic validity. Thirdly, an additional feature of Lewo that is highlighted in this study is the extremely significant role that verb serialisation plays at different levels of the grammar of the language. Verb serialisation is appealed to as an unified explanation of aspects of structure at the level of verb morphology, clause structure, and interclausal relations. A theoretical contribution of this study is the extended application of Lehmann’s generalised typology of clause linkage (Lehmann 1988) to the phenomenon of serialisation in Lewo. Perhaps the major defect of the current study is that like most other grammars of languages, it attempts to cover a great span of material. With the usual limitations of time and space that apply, I have no doubt that every aspect of the language mentioned in the study could be covered to a much greater depth.