Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America

Abstract

that Melanesian Pidgin is exceptional in its degree of syntactical and morphological complexity. The richest chapters, understandably, are those dealing with Solomons Pidgin, particularly as spoken in central Malaita, where Keesing has carried out extensive ethnographic research for several decades. A significant result is the demonstration that the grammaticalization of bambae (bye and bye) to mark future and/or irrealist verbs can be dated prior to the period of creolization. (Here Keesing relies on elderly Kwaio informants who learned pidgin in the I9zos and I930S.) Equally fascinating is the argument that the i (he) pronoun following a noun subject corresponds to a widespread Oceanic verbal and cannot be considered merely the cliticization of he. Part of the difficulty in estimating the relative importance of substrate and superstrate languages is that pidgins are interpreted differently by speakers of the two linguistic sources, each group producing mutually acceptable sentences using different grammatical rules of interpretation. This linguistic situation resembles, it seems to me, the more general phenomenon of cross-cutting codes and values in Pacific contact situations that Sahlins has characterized as a chiasmic structure of conjuncture. Given this, it would have been helpful if Keesing had presented data on the differential evaluation of pidgins by both Europeans and Islanders. Of particular interest to readers of this journal is Keesing's attention to the methodological problems of this study, including discussion of the incompleteness and fragmentation of existing linguistic and historical data, the inherent bias or filtering in European recording of Islanders' linguistic usage, the intentional distortion by simplification by Islanders when speaking to Europeans, and the political restrictions on current ethnographic research in various places in Melanesia. Readers should be advised that this book is concerned with pidgins, not creoles, so little space is given to the contemporary question of the political impact of the nativization of pidgins throughout Melanesia. There is, however, an underlying political message in Keesing's insistence on the creative role of Islanders in producing pidgins consistent with their common Oceanic heritage.