Malayo-Polynesian Research Articles

Equidistance returns

Abstract Modern generative linguistic theory furnishes a variety of general principles that appear to be at work in the grammar of all the world’s languages. One of the most basic and uncontroversial of these principles is that Agree/Move operates according to the constraint Attract Closest, which dictates that the closest suitable goal must be the target for the relevant operation (Rizzi 1990; Chomsky 1995, 2000; Richards 1998). The Polynesian language Niuean (Tongic subgroup, predicate initial word order, ergative-absolutive case system) presents a well known challenge to the universality of {Attract Closest}. The challenge manifests in a variety of distinct constructions in Niuean, but the best known case involves an operation first documented by Seiter (1980), which he terms “raising.” Specifically, Niuean raising appears to license an A-type dependency between the subject position of the matrix clause and the object position of an immediately embedded clause. This is illustrated in (1), where the semantic object of the embedded subjunctive clause, Sione, appears as the syntactic subject of the matrix predicate maeke. (1) To maeke a Sione$_{1}$ [ke lagomatai he ekekafo $t_{1}$]. fut possible abs Sione sbj help erg doctor ‘It’s possible the doctor can help Sione.’ (lit.: Sione is possible that the doctor help [him]) Granting that the filler-gap dependency in (1) is A-type, this is both a clear violation of {Attract closest} (Rizzi 1992; Chomsky 1995; Richards 1998) and a typological anomaly. Our aim in this paper is to argue that such apparent violations of {Attract Closest} are only that. Specifically, we show first that the challenge inherent in Seiter’s raising construction is pervasive throughout the language: in general, objects are accessible to syntactic operations even if the intervening clause-mate subject is also a licit target. In other words, Niuean clause-mate subjects and objects are equally accessible to syntactic operations. Then, we argue that this typologically uncommon equal-accessibility follows from the convergence of several otherwise independently attested operations: (i) a configurational system of case licensing, with a $v$P as the case computation domain; (ii) obligatory object shift to Spec($v$P); (iii) an EPP on T triggering V/VP-raising rather than DP externalization. The resulting basic clause structure is then as below, so that Niuean adheres to standard locality constraints. (2)

Dental Indications of Polynesian Affinity for Prehistoric Rotuma Islanders, South Pacific

Human skeletal reburial, reasonable from a religious and personal point of view, nevertheless diminishes the physical record of human evolution. The present study preserves some information for a small but rare Pacific Basin skeletal assemblage. Prehistoric human tooth-bearing cranial and jaw fragments and loose teeth of probably 19 individuals excavated on Rotuma Island were examined for crown and root morphology. The purpose of the examination was to assess whether these individuals were morphologically more like Melanesians or Polynesians. Rotuma is in the Polynesian culture area north of the Fiji group, which exhibits archaeological and ethnographic evidence of colonists from both Oceanic populations. Polynesians belong to the Malayo-Polynesian language family, so if the Rotuma teeth are similar to Polynesians they should also be more similar to Southeast Asian teeth than to those of linguistically different Melanesians or Australians. Indeed, this seems to be the case, although the small Rotuma sample size reduces confidence somewhat in this finding of Rotuma similarity with Polynesians and Southeast Asians.

Jarai as a member of the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages

Jarai as a member of the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages

Population Size and the Rate of Language Evolution: A Test Across Indo-European, Austronesian, and Bantu Languages.

What role does speaker population size play in shaping rates of language evolution? There has been little consensus on the expected relationship between rates and patterns of language change and speaker population size, with some predicting faster rates of change in smaller populations, and others expecting greater change in larger populations. The growth of comparative databases has allowed population size effects to be investigated across a wide range of language groups, with mixed results. One recent study of a group of Polynesian languages revealed greater rates of word gain in larger populations and greater rates of word loss in smaller populations. However, that test was restricted to 20 closely related languages from small Oceanic islands. Here, we test if this pattern is a general feature of language evolution across a larger and more diverse sample of languages from both continental and island populations. We analyzed comparative language data for 153 pairs of closely-related sister languages from three of the world's largest language families: Austronesian, Indo-European, and Niger-Congo. We find some evidence that rates of word loss are significantly greater in smaller languages for the Indo-European comparisons, but we find no significant patterns in the other two language families. These results suggest either that the influence of population size on rates and patterns of language evolution is not universal, or that it is sufficiently weak that it may be overwhelmed by other influences in some cases. Further investigation, for a greater number of language comparisons and a wider range of language features, may determine which of these explanations holds true.

Sex Differentiable Terms in Languages of Flores Island: A Comparative Review

Sex differentiable terms are lexemes that distinguish sex or gender among both humans and nonhuman animals. Focused linguistically and ethnographically on the island of Flores and neighboring islands in eastern Indonesia, the main topic is sex differentiable terms for animals and how these form distinct patterns in different languages. A pattern whereby nonhuman animals are sexually distinguished mainly by two pairs of terms is identified both for the Ngadha-Lio languages of central Flores and for Lamaholot, spoken in the extreme eastern parts of the island and on neighboring islands to the east. Different patterns are found in Sikkanese (spoken in the region intervening between central Flores and Lamaholot), among Manggarai-speakers in western Flores, and on the island of Sumba. In varying degrees, these correspond to the system of sex differentiables employed in Western Malayo-Polynesian languages like Javanese and Malay. Concerning Central Malayo-Polynesian languages spoken within one part of eastern Indonesia, this comparative study contributes to a discussion of a possible original Malayo-Polynesian pattern of sex differentiable classification and a consideration of how central and eastern Florenese patterns may have developed.

Reo Rapa: A Polynesian Contact Language

Old Rapa, the indigenous Eastern Polynesian language of the island of Rapa Iti, is no longer spoken regularly in any cultural domains and has been replaced in most institutional domains by Tahitian. The remaining speakers are elders who maintain it only through linguistic memory, where elements of the language are remembered and can be elicited but they are not actively used in regular conversation. Reo Rapa, a contact language that fuses Tahitian and Old Rapa, which has developed from the prolonged and dominant influence of the Tahitian language in Rapa Iti since the mid nineteenth century, has replaced the indigenous Old Rapa language at home and between most people in regular social interaction. This article analyzes Reo Rapa through an examination of its genesis and its structure. This article furthermore defines Reo Rapa as a unique contact variety, a shift-break language: a language that resulted from stalled shift due to a collective anti-convergence sentiment in the speech community. This article further discusses a variety of Reo Rapa speech, New Rapa, which presents important questions for the natural-ness of language change and the visibility of actuation.

Maîtrise de l’oral et de l’écrit en français et en tahitien : une étude longitudinale du CP au CM2 en Polynésie française

Many international scientific studies underline the advantage of bilingual children in oral language. This is especially evident in their meta-linguistic skills, as well as their writing, reading and written expression. Bilingualism could facilitate meta-linguistic development by allowing the child to differentiate early formal and semantic aspects of the code, perceive the arbitrary relationship between “ signified ” and “ significant ” and develop greater cognitive flexibility. This study, conducted in French Polynesia, had examined the specific effect of bilingual program on the morphological awareness and the cross-lingual effects of Tahitian-French transfers via the written word. A group of 128 Polynesian students were followed longitudinally from the end of First Grade to the end of Fifth Grade. Of these 128 students, 59 were part of an experimental group involved beginning in the First Grade, in two successive educational programs with five hours per week of Polynesian language and culture, which included systematic learning of reading and writing in Tahitian. A selection of 69 other students, who had never participated in these programs, constituted the control group. All students were tested each year on their oral language skills in French and Tahitian. At the end of Third Grade, a morphological awareness assessment in French was introduced (Reder et al., 2013), as well as a task of word recognition (TIME3 of Ecalle, 2006), a reading-comprehension (Lobrot, 1980) and spelling tasks (ECS3, Khomsi, 1998). These standardized assessments have been adapted in Tahitian. The first results acknowledged a positive effect of the bilingual education curriculum on Tahitian oral skills and on cross-lingual links between written skills and morphological awareness. In addition, the Tahitian word recognition greatly helped to explain the French written skills, after controlling the level of French morphological awareness.

Niuean

Niuean (ISO 639-3 code niu) is a Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue, with an additional population of speakers living in New Zealand. Figure 1 indicates where Niue is located with respect to other neighboring islands in the South Pacific. The 2011 Niue Census of Populations and Households cited the number of individuals who had either basic or fluent spoken abilities at 1121 (with 101 non-speakers) (Statistics Niue 2012). English is the second most widely used language on the island. The 2013 New Zealand census cited 4548 individuals living in New Zealand who listed Niuean as one of their languages (Statistics New Zealand 2013). Niuean is classified as ‘definitely endangered’ by UNESCO (Moseley 2010). There are historically two distinct dialects: the older Motu dialect from the northern area, and the more recent Tafiti from the southern area. These dialect differences were once reflected in slight phonological differences in vocabulary items, but the differences have since eroded in the modern language (see McEwen 1970: ix). Previous research on Niuean phonetics and phonology includes a brief outline in Seiter (1980: x), two dictionaries (McEwen 1970, Sperlich 1997), and an article on vowel length (Rolle & Starks 2014). While these works provide an overview of some of the phenomena to be addressed below, this sketch attempts a more thorough documentation of the phonetic structures of Niuean, and provides novel acoustic and articulatory data from the language. Recordings accompanying this paper are of a male speaker (Mr. Krypton Okesene) and a female speaker (the second author).

ˋˋVP'' adverbs without a VP: The syntax of adverbs in Tongan

The Polynesian language Tongan appears to lack surface-oriented motivation for a VP constituent. Even so, adverbial elements appear in both a rightwards location and a leftwards location, superficially similar to the S-adverbs and VP-adverbs in well-studied western European languages. This paper explores how the Tongan ''VP-adverbs'' (as well as others) can be analyzed in HPSG without a VP for those adverbs to attach to. Several kinds of analyses, representing different strands of research on the syntax of adjuncts in HPSG, are explored: a Adjuncts-as-Valents analysis, a VAL-sensitive Adjuncts-as-Selectors analysis, and a WEIGHT-sensitive Adjuncts-as-Selectors analysis. All suggest that an analysis of the adverbs without a VP is possible; a WEIGHT-sensitive Adjuncts-as-Selectors seems to have the fewest issues.

Establishing the Three-Way Voicing Contrast in Madurese Stops

Madurese, a Western Malayo-Polynesian language spoken on the Indonesian island of Madura, has been described as having a three-way voicing contrast (i.e. voiced, voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated) in its stops. However, the fact that the VOT values for voiceless unaspirated and aspirated stops are not large and they are also followed by vowels with different height raises a question if Madurese only contrasts voiced and voiceless stops phonologically instead. The goal of this paper is to establish the phonological status of the voicing contrast in Madurese stops, arguing that Madurese can be better described as a language with a three-way contrast. For this purpose, we provide phonological evidence that includes consonant-vowel interactions, vowel harmony processes and some morphophonemic processes involving vowel height alternations. All of this evidence is also used to substantiate the proposal that consonants trigger vowel height alternation rather than vowels trigger consonant allophony.

Minangkabau -i: A locative, transitivizing, iterative, adversative suffix

Minangkabau, a Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language of Sumatra, displays a small but complicated system of verbal morphology resembling those of its near, better-described relatives Indonesian and Malay. In these languages, the verbal morphemes are multifunctional, and fully characterizing their meanings and uses has proven challenging. We present our findings on -i, which previous literature frequently characterizes as a type of applicative. We identify four distinct productive functions of -i, not all applicative: adding a locative object, transitivizing non-verbal roots, adding iterative/intensive aspects, and imputing adversative readings. Adversative -i has not previously been identified in the literature, and is unattested in Indonesian.

Lateral transfer in Stochastic Dollo models

Lateral transfer, a process whereby species exchange evolutionary traits through nonancestral relationships, is a frequent source of model misspecification in phylogenetic inference. Lateral transfer obscures the phylogenetic signal in the data as the histories of affected traits are mosaics of the overall phylogeny. We control for the effect of lateral transfer in a Stochastic Dollo model and a Bayesian setting. Our likelihood is highly intractable, as the parameters are the solution of a sequence of large systems of differential equations representing the expected evolution of traits along a tree. We illustrate our method on a data set of lexical traits in Eastern Polynesian languages, and obtain an improved fit over the corresponding model without lateral transfer.

The Western Malayo-Polynesian Problem

Since the 1970s, Austronesian higher-order subgrouping has often included a Western Malayo-Polynesian (WMP) node within the larger Malayo-Polyne- sian (MP) group. WMP includes all Malayo-Polynesian languages except for those in Central and Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, although today it is generally not accepted as a valid subgroup. This paper critically assesses WMP, using both linguistic and archaeological evidence. In conclusion, it is claimed that WMP is indeed invalid, and that in its place several primary branches of Malayo-Polynesian are recognized (Western Indonesian, Sumatran, Celebic, South Sulawesi, Chamorro, Palauan, and Moken), plus Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian and Philippines, which may represent either a collection of several yet unnamed primary branches or an innovation-defined linkage. Additionally, it is argued that the 6,750 Proto-WMP reconstructions in the Austronesian comparative dictionary must be reevaluated, where appropriate, as Proto-MP reconstructions.

The journeys of besieged languageseds. by Delyn Day, Poia Rewi, and Rawinia Higgins

Reviewed by: The journeys of besieged languageseds. by Delyn Day, Poia Rewi, and Rawinia Higgins Jeanette King Delyn Day, Poia Rewi, and Rawinia Higgins, eds. 2016. The journeys of besieged languages. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. xii + 349 pp. ISBN 978-1-4438-9943-7. ₤68.99, hardcover. The purpose of the volume is to "hear the voices from some of the languages that find themselves pushed to the peripheries and margins" (vii). As such, the book contains descriptions of fourteen languages, most of which are indigenous and endangered, that have been "besieged" by more dominant languages. Of particular interest to readers of this journal will be the four chapters that focus on languages of Oceania: Hawaiian, Tahitian, Māori, and Barngarla (an Australian aboriginal language). The other languages span the rest of the globe: Hebrew, Piedmontese, Romani, Kashubian, Kernewek (Cornish), Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Kalaallisut (Greenland), Cree, and Ojibway. The approach and focus of each chapter varies considerably, with some of the chapters written from the perspective of those involved at the grassroots as speakers of the languages concerned. This is the case for the Polynesian languages in this volume. Many of the chapters are based on presentations given at the Te Kura Roa Minority Language and Dialect conference held in Dunedin, New Zealand, in April 2015. Ch. 1 gives details about the genesis of the conference as part of the three-year Te Kura Roa project funded by Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand's Māori Centre of Research Excellence. Co-led by professors Poia Rewi and Rawinia Higgins, the project focused on supporting the continuing revitalization of the Māori language by examining both the reasons for the success of community generated initiatives as well as the responsiveness of the state. The Te Kura Roa conference enabled those involved with Māori language revitalization to hear from and interact with international scholars and practitioners from other minority language situations and consider the similarities and differences in each language's situation. Ch. 2 and 3, written by indigenous academics, are highly personal and powerful testimonies of the effects of language loss. In ch. 2, Lorena Fontaine and Brock Pitawanakwat from Canada each describe their own upbringing with Algonquian languages Cree and Ojibway, which were spoken by their grandparents but not passed on to younger generations. They speak eloquently of the resultant cultural loss. With regard to revitalization, Fontaine details the results of language surveys administered among 1,400 participants from the Opaskwayak Cree Nations in 2002 and 2013. These surveys revealed a rapid decline in speakers as well as a virtual loss of intergenerational transmission in the home; just three percent of respondents were speaking only Cree to their children. However, questions on attitudes revealed a very high level of appreciation of the Cree language as an important part of tribal identity. The results galvanized the community to start a pre-school language immersion program. Pitawanakwat outlines an initiative within the Anishinaabe (Ojibway) community to record oral stories in written form. He also notes a 2012 language survey that revealed that only eight percent were using Ojibway at home. These results motivated the Anishinaabe [End Page 513] community to start an immersion program on Manitoulin Island. Both of these examples, confirmed widely with other language groups, illustrate how language surveys can be an empowering catalyst for community action. Kaiwipunikauikawēkiu Lipe was raised as a speaker of Hawaiian and is currently raising her children as speakers. In ch. 3, she uses the traditional Hawaiian reflective ethnographic methodological framework mo'olelo to provide and analyze details about her personal struggles, challenges, and successes. Lipe describes her personal growth and transformation in the face of the effects of the culture bomb inflicted by the English-only colonial agenda enacted through wider policy and the education system. In ch. 4, Vāhi Tuheiava Richaud provides a comprehensive overview of the situation of Tahitian as well as the other languages of French Polynesia. She begins with an outline of French colonization, and follows with demographic information about the ethnic makeup of the islands. Statistics about the household use of the various indigenous languages in French Polynesia in 2012...

Accounting for variability in Malayo-Polynesian pronouns

This article is a suggested explanation for the multiple variants of the forms of some Malayo-Polynesian pronouns that have been characterized as the result of drift. The explanation that is given is referred to here as paradigmatic instability, a phenomenon not previously discussed with reference to these problems. In the cases discussed in this article it is the avoidance of forms that are semantically or pragmatically inappropriate within the context of the paradigm in which they occur which renders the forms morphologically variable and the paradigms in which they occur unstable. In Malayo-Polynesian languages, it is the avoidance of a form that is reconstructed as a plural pronoun in Proto-Austronesian but which in all Malayo-Polynesian daughter languages is found as a singular pronoun. Where this form is retained as part of some other plural forms, it has been lost or modified in a wide range of variants in the daughter languages.

Samoan predicate initial word order and object positions

Verb-initial ordering may be derived by fronting the VP (or a larger constituent) to a specifier position higher than the subject. For VSO languages, this analysis requires that the object raise out of the VP to a position below the subject before the (remnant) VP fronts to the higher position. This paper builds a comprehensive analysis of VSO order in the Polynesian language Samoan, employing the VP-fronting analysis, arguing the account does better than competing derivational accounts (e.g., a head movement account). I argue that evidence for the raising of the complement of V to a VP-external position comes from data showing that the coordination of unaccusative and unergative verbs is not possible in Samoan. This paradigm has a ready explanation under the VP-fronting account: as the complement of V must raise out of the VP before VP-fronting takes place, unaccusative subject DPs are predicted to bind a VP-internal copy. This blocks coordination with unergative VPs which do not contain DP copies (via the Coordinate Structure Constraint). I provide a generalized account of DP movement whereby the functional head v is specified to trigger the movement of all DPs in its local c-command domain to its projected specifier positions. In cases where v does not locally c-command any DP, the requirement is trivially satisfied. I show how this accounts for the observed VSO/VOS word order alternations in Samoan.

Syntax-phonology mapping and the Tongan DP

Tongan, a Polynesian language, is almost entirely head-initial. There are some exceptions to this, including Demonstrative enclitics and the so-called Definitive Accent (Churchward 1953), which appears to be a stress-shift operation, typically in the rightmost word of the DP. One question that arises here is: where does the morphophonological status of being an enclitic come from – particularly in a rather radically head-initial language? By investigating the distributional properties of the Definitive Accent, it will become clear that this is the result of syntactic and phonological structures proceeding without any direct appeal to morphophonological properties.A new formal analysis presented here derives the positions of the Definitive Accent and possible prosodic phrasings, appealing to independently motivated phonological constraints applying to structures with three cross-linguistically supported movement operations. It is shown that achieving this requires neither including morpheme-indexed constraints, nor having lexemes pre-specified with morphophonological properties such as “enclitic” or “prefix”.Finally, Tongan Definitive Accents raise important issues about the immutability of phases. Specifically, it must be that Phonology may access and manipulate previously spelled out material in a way that Syntax cannot, which is in fact exactly what a Minimalist architecture predicts.

Focus and Change in Polynesian Languages

This paper investigates an information structure category (focus) in the Polynesian languages, as it relates to language stability on the one hand and language change on the other. The study concentrates on *ko structures, which are striking because, in VSO languages, they allow a *ko-marked nominal to precede the verb under certain pragmatic conditions. We propose that *ko-marked nominals are focused, according to a precise semantic definition of focus as a syntactic feature that triggers a semantic object (discourse alternatives). First, we show that this semantic account of focus predicts a range of *ko structures found in verb-initial Polynesian systems, including clefts, equatives, topics, wh-questions and forms with focus-sensitive expressions like ‘only'. We propose that *ko structures allow nominals to surface in the initial focus position in the VSO Polynesian languages: in other words, the initial position is both a strict predicate position as well as a focus position, and the maintenance of this information structure–syntax link is remarkably consistent across space and time; in addition, *ko-marked topics precede predicates, but also contain a focus marking. The rest of the paper turns to Polynesian languages that have shifted to SVO word order. We show that once the link between initial position and predicate/focus is lost, *ko structures are eroded or lost. *ko structures are thus a diagnostic for information structure-related language stability or change, as it is correlated with VSO or SVO word order.

Editorial: Abstract Mathematical Cognition.

Editorial: Abstract Mathematical Cognition.

Problematic Protoforms: Some “Hidden” Indic Loans in Western Malayo-Polynesian Languages

This paper (re)examines a number of phonologically regular lexical reconstructions assigned to different Austronesian protolanguages. I will postulate a number of alternative scenarios involving early borrowing from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. The loanwords proposed here encompass the domains of metallurgy and weaponry, structures and construction techniques, and other objects of practical use. While most of the data in this paper are linguistic, evidence from philology, archaeology, and archaeobotany is occasionally invoked as a control mechanism for lexical reconstruction. Doing so adds a novel dimension to our understanding of language contact and the nature of early Austronesian speech communities. Attention is also given to the geographical distribution and phonological integration of “Indic” loans in Austronesian-speaking Maritime Southeast Asia.