The language of Paama (New Hebrides)
Date
1979
Authors
Crowley, Terry
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Abstract
The present work is a description of the language spoken on
the island of Paama in the New Hebrides, a language which is otherwise
undescribed except for a short grammatical sketch that was published
in the early 1900's on the basis of a missionary's translation of the
Bible. The language, referred to throughout as "Paamese" in the
absence of any particular indigenous name, is an Austronesian
language of the Oceanic branch. It is a language with much greater
morphological complexity than other Oceanic languages such as Fijian
and the Polynesian languages, though it is considerably simpler than
other Oceanic languages of the southern New Hebrides and New Caledonia.
Chapter I has been written to provide the reader with the
linguistic, socio-cultural and geographic background necessary for an
appreciation of the remainder of the work.
Chapter II describes the phonological system of the language.
This is a rather complex system in that there is a basic set of
oppositions, which differs quite markedly from the surface set of
oppositions in both nature and distribution. This somewhat abstract
treatment of the phonology is necessary to account for the various
kinds of surface alternations in the language, and to enable a
simpler general statement of the phonological system to be made.
Mediating between the underlying and surface levels, there is a set
of complex ordered and unordered phonological rules.
Chapter III presents the various form classes, along with the
distinguishing morpho-syntactic characteristics and semantic content
of each. Chapter IV describes the structure of the nominal phrase. It
is shown that nominal phrases can be viewed as either simple (containing
only a single head) or complex (containing two heads). In a
complex nominal phrase, the two nominal phrase heads are related in
a number of different ways semantically and grammatically. In this
chapter, the nature and behaviour of nominal phrase adjuncts is also
described.
Chapter V describes the structure of the verb phrase. One of
the most characteristic features of Paamese verbs is the alternation
in the form of the initial segments of verb roots according to the
nature of the syntactic environment the forms occur in, a characteristic
incidentally that Paamese shares with a number of other New Hebridean
languages. The inflectional and derivational morphology of Paamese
verbs is also described. It is shown that there is some morphological
reanalysis taking place in the language, making for difficulties in
giving a purely synchronic analysis. Finally, this chapter describes
the behaviour of verb phrase adjuncts, especially those verb phrases
in which a verbal head is followed by one or more verbal adjuncts.
Chapter VI provides a description of the clause level grammar
of the language. The various syntactic relationships which hold
between various kinds of phrase level constituents are described, along
with the semantic correlates of these constructions. This includes a
description of prepositional constructions and the complex possessivetype
constructions. Also included in this chapter is a description of
interrogative clauses and interjections.
This description does not go beyond the clause level. There
is, therefore, no attempt to deal with inter-clausal relations, nor is
there any attempt at discourse analysis. This decision has been made so that the account of the lower levels of analysis could be presented in
as much detail as possible. Detailed descriptions of the grammars of
insular Melanesian languages are particularly lacking, and it is hoped
that this thesis will help fill the gap.
This is not to say, however, that I regard the higher levels
of analysis as of lesser significance. Quite the contrary. Rather
than give a sketchy account at this stage, I would prefer to leave it
as a research priority for the future. Another priority is to publish,
for the people of Paama, as many of the stories (traditional and modern)
that I recorded on tape in Paamese. There is a strong likelihood that
a sizeable volume of Paamese texts will appear in 1980.
Attached as an appendix are the numbers 1-60 in Paamese, a
short basic lexicon with English glosses and some illustrative text
material with English translations.
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