Towards a lexicogrammar of Mekeo

Abstract

This dissertation represents a first broad sketch of the grammar of the dialects of Mekeo, an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea. The dissertation consists of an evaluation of a finite corpus of data and a preliminary analysis of this data, with some incidental discussion of issues raised bv it. A more definitive description of these four dialects will be some years in the coming. Mekeo represents the western limit of Austronesian expansion along the southern coast of Papua New Guinea. There are four distinct varieties of Mekeo (one of these a convergent dialect, hitherto unreported). One of these varieties has been - and indeed still is by its speakers - called 'Kovio'. This dialect (spoken only in two small villages) appears to have no special linguistic relationship with Lapeka Kuni, despite persistent folk-historical claims to the contrary. Mekeo is a predominantly head-marking language. This feature is shared by certain Oceanic languages, and with most of the Papuan languages, facts of no tittle importance for historical linguistics. As a head-marking language Mekeo is characterised by the absence of a governing relation between the verb and its nominal arguments, and a unilateral syntactic dependency of the noun on the verb. The verb on the other hand ’depends on’ the nouns for the denotational meaning of its incorporated pronominal arguments. I describe Mekeo grammar on a number of simultaneous levels of structure, but chiefly the syntactic and the discourse-pragmatic. Mekeo, tike other head-marking languages, has pronominal arguments incorporated in the verb word. It is also a non-configurational language, and nominals can have an attributive or a predicative function. Mekeo compares in this with Warlpiri, which is however a double-marking language. Mekeo displays a general lack of mophosyntactic reference-tracking mechanisms, although fronting conventions constrain the possibilities of coreference somewhat. There is consequently a relatively high degree of referential indeterminacy, which may be functional in the culture. Pragmatic anaphora - or coherence - is the main source of definiteness, which is largely unmarked. There are no inherent form-function classes corresponding to nouns and verbs, though most roots function typically as one or the other. However, any lexical root can function either as an unmarked non-verbal topic or as the nucleus of a verb word, and in this latter case takes all the morphosyntactic marking that that entails. Even very abstract terms for modes of locomotion or mental reaction function as possessable, countable topics, and what seem to be very concrete terms appear as inchoative verbs. However, while there is no noun-verb dichotomy, there is a complex system of verb classes, defined in terms of their derivational potential, to which all roots belong. The notion of fixed case-frames subcategorised by given verbs is replaced here by the system of verb classes, each of which belongs to one of two systems of verbal alternations, the system of transitivity and the system of causativity. Mekeo operates with a lexical index of pragmatically specifiable scenes, and roots are unspecified in advance for the number and function of obligatory case roles. The speaker and the hearer are largely free to perspectivise these scenes in whichever way they wish. Syntactically speaking, word order in Mekeo is free apart from the verb word, which always functions as a part of the predicate and which (with a very few exceptions) is always clause-final. However, the order of pre-verbal elements in a predication is in effect constrained by coreference restrictions on a fronted topic. Often neither word order nor morphology reflect a distinction between predicative and attributive constructions. However, when an utterance ceases to function as a predication and is embedded in another, it loses the illocutionary force of an assertion. I refer to this as rankshift rather than embedding, since the former term connotes the absence of structural change which marks the change of function. This situation drastically simplifies an account of the grammar in terms of the number of different structures to be described. I have documented the morphosyntactic resources of the language across all its four dialects, and charted fashions of use. Usage is compared across all four dialects whenever the data permits - they way things are actually said as opposed to ways in which they can be said. However, the limits of the sayable remain to be ascertained, and a more thoroughgoing analysis of the lexicogrammar is already planned. A central theoretical question of this dissertation was: "How can Mekeo tolerate such high levels of referential indeterminacy?" I show that one answer to this question lies in the dicourse-pragmatic exploitation of a specialised kind of specificational relative clause, with an abstract nominal head, which is as it were designed to answer the constant query: "Which one of those do you mean?" Show more