Topics in Oceanic Morphosyntax

351 Pages·2011·1.675 MB·English

by  Claire Moyse-Faurie

Topics in Oceanic Morphosyntax
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 239
Editor
Volker Gast
Founding Editor
Werner Winter
Editorial Board
Walter Bisang
Hans Henrich Hock
Heiko Narrog
Matthias Schlesewsky
Niina Ning Zhang
Editors responsible for this volume
Volker Gast
Walter Bisang
De Gruyter Mouton
Topics in
Oceanic Morphosyntax
Edited by
Claire Moyse-Faurie
Joachim Sabel
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-025989-6
e-ISBN 978-3-11-025991-9
ISSN 1861-4302
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
TopicsinOceanicmorphosyntax/editedbyClaireMoyse-Faurie,Joa-
chimSabel.
p.cm.(cid:2)(Trendsinlinguistics.Studiesandmonographs;239)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN978-3-11-025989-6(alk.paper)
1. Austronesian languages (cid:2) Morphology. 2. Austronesian lan-
guages(cid:2)Syntax. 3.Austronesianlanguages(cid:2)Grammar. I.Moyse-
Faurie,Claire. II.Sabel,Joachim,1962(cid:2)
PL5033.T67 2011
4991.5(cid:2)dc23
2011031600
BibliographicinformationpublishedbytheDeutscheNationalbibliothek
TheDeutscheNationalbibliothekliststhispublicationintheDeutscheNationalbibliografie;
detailedbibliographicdataareavailableintheInternetathttp://dnb.d-nb.de.
”2011WalterdeGruyterGmbH&Co.KG,Berlin/Boston
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Table of contents
Introduction 1
Claire Moyse-Faurie and Joachim Sabel
Part one: Sentential syntax and sentence types
Deriving linear order in OV/VO languages:
evidence from Oceanic languages 27
Joachim Sabel
Questions and answers in Niuean 65
Diane Massam, Donna Starks and Ofania Ikiua
Questions and word order in Polynesian 107
Eric Potsdam and Maria Polinsky
Nominalization and exclamation in Oceanic languages 135
Claire Moyse-Faurie
Part two: Nominal morphosyntax
Two or three things in the Unua noun phrase 163
Elizabeth Pearce
Noun incorporation in Saliba 203
Anna Margetts
Noun-phrase conjunction inAustronesian languages:
additive, inclusory and comitative strategies 235
Isabelle Bril
vi Table of contents
Part three: Historical developments
Neither accusative nor ergative:
an alternative analysis of case in Eastern Polynesian 289
Yuko Otsuka
Grammaticalization of Tahitian mea ‘thing, matter’
into a stative aspect 319
JacquesVernaudon
Subject index 341
Language index 343
Introduction
The Austronesian language family consists of some 1200 genetically related
languagesdispersedoveranareaencompassingMadagascar,Taiwan,Southeast
Asia, and islands of the Pacific. The Oceanic language group, comprising at
least450languages,isalargesubgroupwithinthislanguagefamily.Thespeak-
ersoftheselanguagesinhabitthegeographicalareaencompassingMelanesia,
MicronesiaandPolynesia.
Oceanic languages exhibit a number of typologically and theoretically in-
terestingmorphosyntacticproperties,manyofwhichhavebeenrelativelylittle
studiedandarestillunder-explored.Inthisintroduction,wewilldiscusssome
relevantphenomenathatarealsoaddressedinthearticlesinthisvolume,with
particular reference to the form and function of sentences, matters of nomi-
nalmorphosyntaxandhistoricaldevelopmentsinseveraldomains.Forfurther
discussion of morphosyntactic aspects of Oceanic languages, the reader is re-
ferred to Lynch (1998), Lynch, Ross, and Crowley (2002), and Ross (2004b).
Forcomparativeandtypologicalstudiesonspecificdomainssuchasserialverb
constructions, complex predicates and negation see Bril & Ozanne-Rivierre
(2004), Crowley (2002), Senft (2008), Hovdhaugen & Mosel (1999), and for
a discussion of the linguistic representation of space and deixis see Bennardo
(2002)andSenft(2004).
OceaniclanguagesdisplayVSO,VOS,SVOandSOVconstituentorder.As
statedbyRoss(2004b:495),almostalloftheverb-finallanguages“arelocated
on or near the mainland of New Guinea and belong to the North New Guinea
andPapuanTiplinkages.”Theseverb-finalOceaniclanguageshavebeenincon-
tact with SOV non-Austronesian (Papuan) languages and their non-canonical
constituentorderisundoubtedlyduetothiscontact.Furthermore,Oceaniclan-
guages have subject/object agreement markers and additional verbal markers
fortransitivity,specialcoordinationstrategies,freewordorderandspecialpos-
sessivemarking.Oceaniclanguagesmakeuseofnoun-incorporation,usesev-
eral possibilities of forming wh-questions such as wh-in situ, wh-ex situ and
partial wh-movement and they display interrogative verbs. Other notable fea-
turesincludetheformationofserialverbconstructions,extensiveuseofnom-
inalizations, and sentence type markers.As far as their alignment systems are
concerned,Oceaniclanguageshavenominative-accusativeaswellasergative-
absolutivecasemarking.
2 Introduction
The articles published in this volume bring together comparative work on
someofthesemorphosyntacticfeaturesofOceaniclanguages,whichareeither
subjecttovariationorshowuniformitywithinthefamily.Mostofthemarere-
visedversionsofpapersgivenattheSeventhConferenceonOceanicLinguistics
(Numea,NewCaledonia,July2007).Thebookisdividedintothreeparts.The
first part discusses the form and function of sentences in Oceanic languages,
the second addresses selected topics in nominal morphosyntax and the third
deals with historical aspects of the morphosyntax of Oceanic languages.The
datainthearticlescomefrommanyendangeredlanguages,themajoritycoming
fromtheauthors’ownfieldwork.Notallofthearticlesarewritteninaspecific
theoreticalframework.Somearticlesprovideempiricaland/ortypologicalgen-
eralizations, whereas others also interpret the data discussed with respect to
implicationsforcurrenttheoreticaldevelopments.
We hope that the volume will lead to further investigations into Oceanic
languagesfromdescriptiveaswellastheoreticallyorientedlinguists.1
Partone:Sententialsyntaxandsentencetypes
ThefirstfourpapersofthepresentvolumedealwithsentencetypesinOceanic
languages.Sentencetypeslikeinterrogatives,declaratives,andimperativescon-
stitutefunctionalclassesthatappearinalllanguagesoftheworld(Saddockand
Zwicky1985;Ko¨nigandSiemund2006).Theirsurfacerealizationvariessub-
stantially,asisshownbyempiricalcross-linguisticstudies.Fromatheoretical
pointofview,theconstitutionofsentencetypesisbasedontheinteractionbe-
tweenvariousgrammaticalmeanssuchaswordorder,inflectionalmorphology,
particles, and intonation, which jointly determine the unique semantic (func-
tional)objectcorrespondingtotherelevantsentencetype.
Thenotionof‘sentencetype’,however,isnotalwaysunderstoodinaniden-
tical manner in the relevant literature. Foley andVanValin (1984) divide sen-
tence properties into three categories: illocutionary role (speech act mode),
realis/irrealis, and mode. Bybee (1985, chapter 8) and Cinque (1999) classify
sentence types into speech act properties (imperative, interrogative, optative),
epistemicmodality(evidentialdegree),andgrammaticalmode(subjunctive,in-
dicative, imperative).A sentence type is understood here as a concept, which
relates speaker attitudesand propositionsin systematic ways, an intuitionthat
wasexpressedasearlyasthebeginningofthepreviouscenturybythephiloso-
1.We would like to thankVolker Gast for his comments on the introduction and Jean-Michel
Roynardforhishelpinturningthemanuscriptintoabook.
Introduction 3
pher and mathematician Gottlob Frege (1879) in his investigations into the
modal force of sentences.An analysis of the connection between speech acts
and syntactic structure was furthermore proposed in generative semantics (cf.
Ross 1970).There is one complication, however, in that a one-to-one correla-
tiondoesnotalwaysholdbetweensyntacticstructuresandspeechacts/sentence
types.Astatement,forexample,maybeexpressedwithadeclarativesentence
but also with an interrogative sentence in the case of rhetorical questions.An
ordermaybeexpressedwithimperativesentencesbutalsowithdeclarativeor
interrogativesentences.
Sentence types may be analyzed from a synchronic, comparative, and his-
toricalpointofview.Recentsyntacticanalysesintheframeworkofgenerative
grammarfocusingontheleftsententialperipheryassumeasmallsetofuniver-
salgrammaticalfeaturesandstructuralpositions(Rizzi1997)thataresupposed
to allowfor a derivationanda unifiedtreatmentof several sentencetypes(es-
peciallyy/n-interrogatives,wh-interrogatives,declaratives,togetherwithfocus
and topicalization phenomena). The split of the left peripheral complemen-
tizersystemintoastructuralhierarchyoffunctionalcategories‘force’>‘topic’
(Top) > ‘focus’(Foc) > ‘finiteness’(Fin) as proposed by Rizzi (1997) can be
illustratedwiththefollowingexamplefromtheWesternAustronesianlanguage
Malagasy.The overt topic head dia and the focus head no, as well as a lower
silenttopichead,arerealized,providingevidenceinfavorofRizzi’sprojection
hierarchy:
Malagasy
(1) Force> Top> Foc>
...(fa) i Ketaka dia tany Betafo no
that det Ketaka top there Betafo focus
Top> Fin
matetika, n-iasa.
often pst-work
‘(...that)asforKetaka,itisinBetafothatsheoftenworked.’
The analysisof the left periphery of sentencesleads to the further assumption
thatfocus/topicfeatures,usuallyconnectedtodiscourseconditions,andgram-
maticalfeatures(forexample,interrogative)arecloselyrelatedonthesyntactic
level.This opens up the perspective that these features depend on each other
to a large degree, thereby strongly affecting sentence type constitution. The
complementizersystemisseenastheinterfacebetweenapropositionalcontent
(expressedbytheareabelowthecomplementizer)andthesuperordinatestruc-
ture(eitherahigherclauseincasesofanembeddedsentenceorthearticulation