Ku Waru Research Articles

Ku Waru Clause Chaining and the Acquisition of Complex Syntax

How do children learn to understand and use complex syntactic constructions? In English, Diessel (2004) shows that they do so in two different ways. Complex sentences with dependent clauses (e.g., ‘Peter promised that he would come’) develop out of simple sentences that are gradually expanded into multi-clause ones. Complex sentences with coordinate clauses (e.g., ‘He tried hard, but he failed’) develop by integrating two independent sentences into a single two-clause unit. Here we expand on that research by focusing on the acquisition of a kind of complex syntactic structure which involves both dependency and coordination – the clause chain – in Ku Waru, a Papuan language spoken in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Clause chains are constructions coordinating multiple clauses in sequence, where the non-final or ‘medial’ clauses are in a dependent relationship with the final clause. One function of clause chains, which is often taken to be the prototypical one, is to refer to a series of events in sequence. Some Ku Waru clause chains do refer to sequential events. Other Ku Waru clause chains containing particular verbs refer to single events, sometimes with the particular verb providing aspectual or adverbial qualification (‘keep doing’, ‘do quickly’, etc.). In this article, we track their acquisition of several different kinds of clause chains based on longitudinal recordings of four children acquiring Ku Waru as their first language between the ages of 1½ and 5. We show that, although there are differences among the children in the ages at which they acquire the various kinds of clause chain, all four of them follow the same series of steps in doing so. In conclusion, we compare our findings to Diessel’s for English. We find that they are similar in some ways and different in others, which may be related to the differences between subordinate constructions, coordinate non-dependent constructions and coordinate-dependent constructions.

Intersubjectivity and engagement in Ku Waru

Abstract Following Evans et al. (2018a, 2018b), I use “engagement” to refer to grammatical encoding of the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. I refer to what is thereby encoded as the “engagement function”. How neatly does that function map on to grammatical categories of particular languages? Here I address that question with respect to the Papuan language Ku Waru, focusing on spatial and epistemic demonstratives, and definiteness and indefinite marking. I show that forms within each of those word/morpheme classes do serve engagement functions, but in cross-cutting and partial ways. I show how the engagement function is also achieved through poetic parallelism, prosody, gaze direction and other aspects of bodily comportment. In the examples considered, the engagement function is realised through interaction between those extra-linguistic features and the grammatical ones. The main thing that is added by grammatical engagement marking is an explicit signalling of the intersubjective accord that has been achieved on other bases. I hypothesize that that is true of engagement overall, and conclude by suggesting some ways to test that hypothesis and to advance the understanding of engagement more generally.

Positional Verbs in Nen

In this paper, I lay out the workings of the rather unusual system of positional verbs found in Nen, a language of the Morehead-Maro family in Morehead district, Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Nen is unusual in its lexicalization patterns: it has very few verbs that are intransitive, with most verbs that tend to be intransitive cross-linguistically realized as morphologically middle verbs, including ‘talk’, ‘work’, ‘descend’, and so on. Within the fifty attested morphologically intransitive verbs, forty-five comprise an interesting class of “positional verbs,” the subject of this paper; the others are ‘be’, its derivatives ‘come’ and ‘go’ (lit. ‘be hither’ and ‘be thither’), and ‘walk’. Positional verbs denote spatial positions and postures like ‘be sitting’, ‘be up high’, ‘be erected (of a building)’, ‘be open’, ‘be in a tree-fork’, ‘be at the end of something’. Positional verbs differ from regular verbs in lacking infinitives, in possessing a special “stative” aspect inflection and an unusual system for building a four-way number system (building large plurals by combining singular and dual markers), and in participating in a productive three-way alternation between positional statives (like ‘be high’), placement transitives (like ‘put up high’), and get-into-position middles (like ‘get into a high position’). The latter two types are more like normal verbs (for example, they possess infinitives and participate in the normal TAM series), but they are formally derived from the positionals. The paper concludes by situating the Nen system regionally and typologically. Similar systems are found in related languages, but with the exception of the Eastern Torres Strait language Meriam Mer, no comparable system has been reported anywhere in New Guinea—the “classificatory verbs” known from languages like Ku Waru are quite different, serving primarily to classify objects rather than to give spatial dispositions. On the other hand, rather similar systems are found in some parts of Meso-America and the Amazon.

Bilingual language learning and the translation of worlds in the New Guinea Highlands and beyond

This article deals with two kinds of translation among Ku Waru people in the New Guinea Highlands: (1) translation between the local language and the national lingua franca within everyday interactions between young children and their caregivers; (2) intercultural translation between the story world of a local genre of sung tales and the contemporary lived world of Highland Papua New Guineaas practiced by skilled composer-performers of the genre. Although these two kinds of translation take place on very different planes, they both operate in terms of a well-developed set of procedures establishing equivalence, between words and worlds, respectively. On both planes a key role is played by parallelism, suggesting a connection between equivalence in the ordinary sense of the word and in the specific sense of it that was developed by Roman Jakobson—a connection which is significant for the understanding of translation in general.

Intersubjectivity, deception and the ‘opacity of other minds’: Perspectives from Highland New Guinea and beyond

How are we to understand the widely attested claim from around the world that one can never know the thoughts of another? Here I consider that question as it arises in the Ku Waru region of Highland Papua New Guinea. Drawing on evidence from three kinds of speech events, I show that the Opacity Doctrine there is less about the problem of knowing other minds than about the possibility that others might be hiding their intentions. In order to understand its consequences for everyday life, I argue for the importance of distinguishing among: (1) metapragmatic discourse about minds and intentions; (2) discourse pragmatics; and (3) the more inclusive realm of intercorporeal engagement in which 1 and 2 are grounded.

Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands: Studies in Form, Meaning, and Sociocultural Context ed. by Alan Rumsey, Don Niles (review)

Reviewed by: Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands: Studies in Form, Meaning, and Sociocultural Context ed. by Alan Rumsey, Don Niles Courtney Handman Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands: Studies in Form, Meaning, and Sociocultural Context. Edited by Alan Rumsey and Don Niles. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2011. Pp. xvi + 330. $24.95 (paper). Although the highlands of Papua New Guinea only became the subject of anthropological research in the 1930s, researchers have been thick on the ground ever since and the amount of information on the communities in this region is exceptional. But even with all of this work, highlands research has suffered from a number of gaps, including a glaring shortage of linguistic anthropological work and relatively few comparative projects that examine regional practices across ethnolinguistic boundaries. The present volume helps to fill in both of these gaps with a series of articles examining the poetics and musicality of the complex tales chanted or sung by master storyteller bards. The contributions in this edited volume all focus on this extraordinary performance genre in which mostly male bards extemporaneously compose songs that relate traditional lore. The practice is, or was, an important performance genre among Duna (also known as Yuna), Huli, Enga, Ipili, Angal, Ku Waru, and Melpa speakers, to list only those ethnolinguistic groups represented by articles in this volume. The contexts of performance varied, but in many cases male bards performed sung tales in men’s houses to an audience that sometimes interjected standard exclamations and encouragements. The song topics vary across ethnolinguistic groups, from the interactions between “sky people” and the first humans to the courtship of magical women. The songs are performed by the composer-bard without instrumentation to tunes that follow a standard form (for example, in the Duna-Yuna case, each line has two parts, first descending several notes and then staying on a single note for the rest of the line). The volume contains thirteen chapters, including an introduction by the editors framing the project as a whole. As the editors note, there has been very little written about this performance genre even though it is practiced across the Highlands region and even though the Highlands region is extremely well studied in other respects. Given this lack, the volume as a whole makes an important contribution by documenting and analyzing examples of these tales from seven different ethnolinguistic groups. One of the most important concepts developed throughout many of the chapters is “parallelism” as [End Page 196] defined by Roman Jakobson. Jakobson discussed parallelism—what Rumsey pithily calls “repetition with variation” (p. 252)—as a primary form of poetic structure. The segmentation of text into lines and the overlapping of repeating parallel elements within and across lines are examined in many of these chapters as the key feature of song composition (see especially chapters 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 11). Of particular note are the chapters that focus on the ways in which parallelisms are constructed across linguistic and musical forms (chapters 4, 8, and 11). In addition to this focus on poetic form, the chapters in the volume present structural and formal analyses using a number of methodologies from linguistics and ethnomusicology. Chapters by Kenny Yuwi Kendoli, Kirtsy Gillespie and Lila San Roque, and Michael Sollis discuss Duna-Yuna versions of sung texts from a number of different angles. Kendoli, a Yuna man whose interview is transcribed here, provides an insider’s account of the evaluative criteria audience members and bards use to judge performances, among other topics. Gillespie and San Roque provide a formal analysis of the structure of a song in both linguistic and musicological terms. Sollis discusses the forms of parallelism in Duna sung tales. There are two chapters about sung tales in Huli; Gabe C. J. Lomas focuses on forms of textual and linguistic cohesion across clauses and sentences, and Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan analyzes the ways in which melody distorts linguistic tone in sung performances. Three chapters focus on Enga and Ipili sung tales. Philip Gibbs moves away from structural considerations to examine how bards evoke their imagined worlds for their audiences through metaphorical speech. Terrance Borchard’s contribution to the chapter...

‘Optional’ ergativity and the framing of reported speech

This paper focuses on optional ergative marking in the Papuan language Ku Waru and the Australian Aboriginal language Bunuba, especially in constructions with verbs of speaking. It addresses two interrelated issues: (i) What semantic and pragmatic factors are associated with the difference between ergative and non-ergative subject marking in languages where this is not strictly determined by whether the verb is grammatically transitive or intransitive; (ii) How are we to understand the grammatical relationship between verbs of speaking and the material they frame? In both languages that material behaves in some respects like a grammatical object. These locutionary objects differ among themselves in the extent to which they stand out as distinct speech events in relation to the framing one, and those differences are correlated with the presence or absence of ergative marking on the subject of the framing verb. I argue that Bunuba and Ku Waru optional ergative marking in this context can be accounted for by an extended version of Hopper and Thompson's notion of object individuation, in which the grammar treats the metalinguistic relationship between reported speech and that which reports it as analogous to that between Patient and Agent in canonical transitive clauses.

Confession, Anger and Cross-Cultural Articulation in Papua New Guinea

As will be evident from our introductory essay, the impetus for this Social Thought and Commentary section has come in part from our puzzlement at the co-occurrence within Melanesianist ethnography of two apparently contradictory motifs. One is the widely reported idea that one can never know what is in the minds of others, partly because what they say cannot be taken as a reliable indicator of what they are thinking. The other motif is the rising prominence of various more-or-less institutionalized practices of confession, as exemplified with respect to indigenized Christianity by the Urapmin example discussed by Robbins. These practices of confession would seem to stand in a problematical relationship to claims about the impossibility of knowing what is in the mind of another, since that is precisely what they would seem to be designed to reveal. The essays by Robbins and Schieffelin address this problem by taking the motif as their starting point and then considering new practices of confession and how they impact upon speech communities whose preexisting language ideologies would seem to deny the reliability or appropriateness of such disclosure. Here I approach the problem from the other way around, by looking first at practices of confession and then asking how they do or do not relate to linguistic ideologies. One point of this will be to show that, in at least some Melanesian locales, practices of confession did not begin only with the arrival of Christianity-that there were earlier forms of it which continue to be practiced alongside, and sometimes in tension with, the church-related ones. The question of the relationship between those older practices and the Christian ones is of especial interest in the context of comparative studies of confession that have been stimulated by Michel Foucault's well-known (1978, 1988) account of late medieval Christian practices of confession as the genealogical precursor and matrix of more recent, secular regimes that have produced the purportedly self-disciplined, modern subject. So far, these comparative studies have been carried out mainly by sociologists and historians, with little direct input from anthropologists. This is unfortunate, for two reasons. The first is that, sophisticated as some of this work has been when dealing with European historical sources, when drawing on anthropological ones it is often far less so. The other reason is that, as we hope these essays will demonstrate, such practices offer a fertile field for comparative study in connection with issues of interest to anthropologists (cf. Strathern and Stewart 1998:62). The fullest comparative studies of confession to date, by Hepworth and Turner (1982), and Abercrombie, Hill and Turner (1986:35-72 et passim), while taking issue with Foucault in some respects, have agreed in their finding that the confessional tradition in Europe laid the foundation for the modern personality as self-reflective consciousness (Abercrombie et al. 1986:47). These writers are well aware from their reading of ethnography that there are other confessional traditions outside of Europe which are of longstanding, but, adopting a Durkheimian position-which incidentally, obviates the issue of mental opacity altogether-they have argued that: confession outside the Western tradition normally assumes a collective, group nature, that is, the confession is a reflection not of the state of mind of the individual, but a reflection of the character of the social structure. We would suggest that such confessionals are in fact very Durkheimian: they are statements about collective properties and forms of public thought, reaffirmations of public values and communal practices, rather than reflections of an interior mentality (1986:46). Let us now consider this position in relation to some cases from Papua New Guinea. Turning first to confessional practices of the more traditional sort, in the Ku Waru area of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea where Francesca Merlan and I have worked, there are well-established practices this kind which are referred to by two kinds of related expressions. …

The Articulation of Indigenous and Exogenous Orders in Highland New Guinea and Beyond

One of the leading challenges for contemporary anthropology is to try to contribute to an understanding of the interaction between indigenous and exogenous socio‐cultural orders, especially at the frontiers of globalisation. Here I review three recent attempts to do so: (1) a model of structural transformation as developed by Marshall Sahlins; (2) a model of articulation as developed by James Clifford; (3) a model of ‘adoption’ proposed by Joel Robbins. As a test case for these models, I consider them in relation to some recent developments in local segmentary politics and verbal art in the Ku Waru region of Highland New Guinea. I show that all three models are in certain respects inadequate for understanding those developments, and offer some proposals as to what kinds of theory might be more adequate to the task.

Ethnosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Ethnosyntax: Explorations in grammar and culture ed. by N. J. Enfield Agustinus Gianto Ethnosyntax: Explorations in grammar and culture. Ed. by N. J. Enfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. ix, 325. ISBN 0199249067. $72 (Hb). The twelve papers in this book look at how far culture can account for language variation, how culture and grammar connect to each other, and what influence one has over the other. The introductory essay by N. J. Enfield (3–30) in Part 1 gives an overview of the development of ethnosyntax and the methodological issues involved. In this connection, Anthony V. N. Diller and Wilaiwan Khanittanan (31–51) show that all syntactic inquiries are likely to be determined by the analyst’s cultural presuppositions about the language. As highlighted by Cliff Goddard (52–73), ethnosyntactic research can legitimately be conceived in a ‘narrow’ sense (culture-related meanings as encoded in the morphosyntax) or in a ‘broad’ sense (further relations between culture and syntax). John Newman (74–95) presents the narrow perspective when he establishes that ‘give’ constructions in Maori, Nahuatl, and Zulu exhibit no obvious correlates outside the grammatical systems they are part of. The papers in Part 2 deal with the relations between culture, semantics, and grammar. As shown by Wallace Chafe (99–109), the male-oriented culture of early North Iroquoian reflected in the gender morphology persists until the present even if male dominance is no longer the case. Andrew Paley (110–37) focuses on rules for gender assignment for inanimate objects in informal Tasmanian English: he for portable things about which the speaker is emotionally indifferent, and she otherwise. Plants, animals, and male genitals are considered masculine while other objects are feminine. Ronald W. Langacker (138–61) shows some common grammaticalization paths in English and Mixtec locative constructions. According to Anna Wierzbicka (162–203), English let reflects these possible meanings: permission, noninterruption, apparent indifference, nonprevention, tolerance, shared information, cooperative dialogue, interaction, thinking, and an offer to perform a service, with let’s proposing joint action as opposed to let us, which expresses authority. [End Page 171] Part 3 is devoted to culture, pragmatics, and grammaticalization. Kate Burridge (207–30) explains that the loss of the subjunctive of wishful thinking, wotte, in Pennsylvania German (Standard German wollte) and its subsequent development into a lexical verb meaning ‘to wish’ is due to the influence of the basic Anabaptist worldview, that is, separateness, nonconformity, humility, and simplicity. She also claims that the development of zehle ‘to count’ as future marker is consistent with the strong Anabaptist belief that future things lie exclusively in God’s will. N. J. Enfield (231–58) attempts to show how Lao’s ideas about the proper bodily postures in doing certain activities weighs considerably on the productivity of certain serialization-involving verbs describing such postures. Alan Rumsey’s paper (259–86) discusses some aspects of social life which are reflected in Ku Waru (New Guinea) existential clauses, the use of 1st and 2nd singular and dual pronouns, and oratorical style. Finally, Jane Simpson (287–307) suggests that some syntactic constructions in Walpiri grammaticalize some commonly held assumptions and expectations that provide some common ground upon which people usually start a conversation. Agustinus Gianto Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Language and politics: Investigations of language and speech by social and cultural anthropologists

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. vii + 305 pp. including index. $44.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Merlan, Francesca and Alan Rumsey. Ku Waru: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; xvii + 387 pp. including appendices, notes, references, and index. $59.50 cloth.

Speech­Making Women and WarriorsFrancescaMerlan and AlanRumsey. 1991. Ku Waru: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New GuineaCambridge: Cambridge University Press, xvii, 387 pp., £40.

Pacific ViewpointVolume 34, Issue 1 p. 101-102 Book ReviewFree Access Speech­Making Women and Warriors Francesca Merlan and Alan Rumsey. 1991. Ku Waru: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xvii, 387 pp., £40. Ann Chowning, Ann Chowning Victoria University of WellingtonSearch for more papers by this author Ann Chowning, Ann Chowning Victoria University of WellingtonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 May 1993 https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.341006AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume34, Issue1May 1993Pages 101-102 RelatedInformation

Ku Waru; Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea

Ku Waru; Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea

Ku Waru: language and segmentary politics in the western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea

Ku Waru: language and segmentary politics in the western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea