Nouns and classificatory verbs in Enga (New Guinea) : a semantic study

Abstract

This thesis is based on fieldwork carried out among the Enga from August 1967 to August 1968, and from May 1969 to September 1969, a total of seventeen months, as a Research Scholar of The Australian National University. The first few months of this period were spent at or near Wabag in the Western Highlands of New Guinea, the remainder at Kopetesa, a small hamlet approximately 30 miles west of Wabag in the western dialect area of Enga. The language chosen for research was based upon two considerations: firstly, that in connection with my husband's fieldwork I was already living among the Enga and had attained a fair degree of speaking proficiency in the language, and secondly, that a considerable amount of linguistic and ethnographic work had already been done on the Enga. This is a semantic study. It arose out of my previous interest in ethnoscience and because of this began with the determination of the features of the animate sub-set of Enga nouns. Since studies "of any sort in ethnozoology are rare" (Sturtevant 1964:120), I felt that this would provide a contribution to a neglected domain. The elicitation of semantic features of the animate nouns provided the first evidence of the Enga existential verbs: any noun elicited would be followed by a verb which indicated its habitual state of existence. Interest in the existential verbs and the elicitation of their features led to the discovery that they co-occurred only with [+concrete] nouns, i.e., that they were classificatory verbs. This led to further work on the verbal system with the result that [-concrete] nouns were found to co-occur with another set of classificatory verbs. Thus, the thesis topic became focused as a semantic study of a portion of Enga, the animate nouns and the classificatory verbs. One of the main features is that the thesis attempts not only to explain the usual occurrences by means of semantic redundancy rules, but also to account for the exceptions to these, i.e., the assumption that rules are broken in accordance with (culturally determined) rules for breaking rules (cf. Landar 1965 and Dixon 1968:120) . The associated problems were: Can semantic features be given? Can semantic redundancy rules be formulated? What are the exceptions to these rules, and can they also be accounted for? Are the rules part of a semantic hierarchy or does cross-classification of the items exist? Can comparative data be given for other New Guinea languages with similar phenomena? The introductory chapter states the problem and gives a description of the data base; Chapter One gives a sketch of the Enga and their culture and of previous linguistic work on Enga. Chapter Two describes the existential verbs, their syntax and semantics. Chapter Three is a brief excursion into the animate nouns, one sub-set of the [+concrete] nouns which co-occur with the existential verbs. Chapter Four describes the c1assificatory verbs which cooccur with the [-concrete] nouns, some problems connected with them, and their semantics. Chapter Five deals with comparative materials from other New Guinea languages on the two kinds of c1assificatory verbs. The thesis concludes with a brief discussion of the results of the study in Chapter Six. The appendices contain supplementary materials on the semantic classes of Enga verbs (A), methods of data compilation (B), data on the Enga existential verbs (C), data on the classificatory verbs for the [-concrete] nouns of Enga (D), and some comparative data from possibly related languages (E ). Show more