CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION
1.2. Theoretical orientation
My first linguistics courses were taken in the early seventies, a two-course menu of tagmemic structuralism at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) courses, and early transformational- generative grammar at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. In the late seventies, I took a course in relational grammar at Auckland University where the nearest thing to a text was a photocopy of a photocopy of some notes of a course by Perlmutter and Postal (Swinbum 1974). At the time, I was also teaching SIL introductory grammar courses, using the more highly developed, but still not well-known, version of tagmemics found in Pike and Pike 1977. This version incorporated the four-cell tagmeme (providing for fully describing grammatical units as form-meaning composites entailing grammatical constituency [slot], manifestation as form [class], semantic function [role], and being constrained by association with syntagmatically- related units [cohesion]); it also allowed for rules to capture structural transformations; and it included the notion of the referential (semantic) hierarchy. Tagmemics had been generally considered to be just a useful heuristic or field-work tool, but these newer developments seemed to advance it beyond this.
Now, at the beginning of the nineties, I have been privileged to attend seminars on advanced syntax and cognitive grammar from leading exponents of each (Avery Andrews and Ronald Langacker respectively), and it is clear that modem linguistics has considerably extended its range of tools for modelling various aspects of the grammar of languages. However, it is equally clear that a complete theory of language remains to be formulated, and that the first fully adequate grammar of any language has yet to be written.
Despite this, a range of motivations demand that languages continue to be described, and so this endeavour proceeds, if on a somewhat ad hoc basis. It is of interest to observe a developing tradition o f language description which is not constrained by slavish conformity to any one particular linguistic theory, but which feels free to draw on useful insights from all.5 This trend seems to be resulting in a more holistic and sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon of human language, and can be observed in many of the grammars of Oceanic languages that have been presented as PhD dissertations in recent years.6 Along with those, this description of Lewo
5 At a more trivial level, this approach also disdains what are claimed to be theory-bound formulaic or algebraic representations, and prefers to see the same information presented in prose description.
6 Eg. Johnston (for Nakanai, 1980) describes his study as “a reference guide” (p. iii), and does not claim to adopt any particular theoretical orientation. Hill (for Longgu, 1992) has no statement of theoretical
is presented as being both non-theoretical, in so far as it is not constrained by the requirements of any one particular theory of grammar, and eclectic, in so far as it incorporates various perspectives developed within different theoretical approaches.
However, while the aim is to gain insight into the structure of Lewo, and not to test a particular theory of grammar, it is not possible to present the grammar of a language in a complete theoretical vacuum. The present description will draw heavily on traditional structural conceptions usually invoked by classical morphosyntactic description, such as:
• the etic versus emic perspective,
• the understanding of hierarchically related levels of grammatical structure, • the reality of linguistic units at each level of structure,
• immediate constituent relationships that pertain between units, and • the usefulness of the concept of slot and filler classes.
Linguistic forms and structures are utilised by speakers to express different kinds of meaning, and to attain particular communicative goals, so this description will also attempt to evidence the relevance of functional and pragmatic understandings of language.
A trend that has influenced this description is the growing recognition that many descriptive and analytical categories have fuzzy borders, and that so-called paradigms of discrete entities are merely collections of points of intersection of a number of different variables.* * 7 Many features of traditional description that were once couched as antonymic pairs, are now regarded as more extreme points on various scales of gradation. The very first linguistics lecture I ever attended presented a number of these oppositions: competence and performance; synchronic and diachronic linguistics; langue and parole, and so on. As time goes by, it is becoming apparent that instead o f sets of bi-polar opposites, aspects of language and its structure can also be seen as being made up o f a number of overlapping and intersecting continua of features.
Some of these continua are expressed as hierarchies. One of the best known is transitivity (Hopper and Thompson 1980). Other such continua include the continuum of synchrony and diachrony (Crowley 1987a:22, 206); the continuum of syntax and lexicon, whereby lexicalisation
orientation as such, other than describing the study as “a general introduction to, and description of, the main areas of Longgu grammar” (p. 3).
7 For example, Lehmann (1993:337) notes that grammaticalization is “gradient, continuous, while existing theories of grammar only allow for clear boundaries”.
Chapter 1 Introduction to the study
is a matter of degree (Pawley 1986b:95);8 the continuum of coordination and subordination (Lehmann 1988); and the continuum of idiomaticity and unnaturalness (ie. natural versus unnatural grammatical strings). In phonology too, the question of whether distinctive features are binary oppositions or multi valued features with gradual oppositions is also being debated (Katamba 1989:41).
There are many areas of this description of Lewo where these insights are applied, albeit informally at times. An important example is in the area of assessing the word-class category of various items, such as those that appear to occupy a middle ground between what are normally thought of as verbs or adjectives (stative verbs), or verbs and adverbs (nuclear layer serial verbs), or verbs and prepositions (verbal prepositions). In these cases, I am content to observe that the Lewo items in question may occupy some kind of middle ground, and should not be shoe-homed into one category or the other.
1.3. Methodology
I first went to live in Vanuatu, with my wife and children, in April 1982. By the following month we were located in a village-style house in Moriu village, north-east Epi, that had been built for us as a community project subscribed to by the whole island. We were invited to Epi by the Tarpumamele Council of Chiefs (of Epi), and the Combined Epi-Lamen Session of the Presbyterian Church of Vanuatu, to facilitate the establishment of a language and literature development project.9 The aspirations and motivations that seemed to be at work in this community-based activity appear to be genuine and transparent. Firstly, there is a growing appreciation and recognition of the value of local cultures and languages throughout Vanuatu, as part of the post-colonial assertion of local identity. Secondly, there is concern in some villages at the inroads that the national language (the English-based pidgin Bislama) is observed to be making. Thirdly, there is a desire for vernacular language materials to be made available for the domain in which literateness is most highly valued at present, which is church life.10
8 “...just as there is a continuum between fully productive rules of sentence formation and rules of low productivity, so there is a cline between fully lexicalised formulations on the one hand and nonce forms on the other” (Pawley and Syder 1983:192).
9 This project, still continuing, is conducted under the auspices of the Vanuatu Christian Council, and my own sponsoring agency, the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
101 have discussed the development of the project, and some of the sociolinguistic parameters that are at work on Epi, in Early 1991. This paper notes the many factors that militate against the prospect of any vernacular language and literature development in Vanuatu being successful in the long term, but argues that there are some hopeful signs and other mitigating factors.
So began the task of language and culture learning, and of building relationships with the Epi people, who were to become very dear friends. We accomplished these missions as participant observers, immersing ourselves in the activities and lives of those whose children’s world became the only world our own children knew .11
As a language learner, I attempted to use a number of structured approaches (eg. Healey 1975, Brewster and Brewster 1976), and found these useful to some extent. However, for whatever reasons of personal predilection, and despite my linguistic training, I did not find myself to be an immediate analyst. In retrospect, language learning was achieved in an interactional assimilationist mode, rather than as systematic scientific inquiry. From a very early stage, it was necessary to use the language in functional and relational contexts, so the focus was on acquiring communicative competence rather than compiling linguistic materials. However, over the years I have maintained a dictionary file for Lewo, and have prepared a set of language learning lessons. Also, a text corpus has been collected, and various linguistic jottings were recorded. As well, in conjunction with the local project personnel, a substantial amount of Biblical material (about 70% of the New Testament) has been translated, and other locally authored texts have been prepared. Drafting, revising and editing these texts with the local mother-tongue translators that I have trained has provided me with a lot more exposure to the language as well.
Although it is now over ten years since we first went to Epi, the total amount of time I have been resident on the island is about five years. As the language project has developed, a multi language approach has been adopted, and I have trained and worked simultaneously with a number of local people from the Lewo, Lamen and Baki languages. This has meant that Bislama has had to function as the working language for interaction within our team, and ongoing development in my facility in Lewo has had to proceed concurrent with the need to attain both full fluency in Bislama, and a good reading knowledge of Lamen and Baki.
Nevertheless, the familiarity with Lewo that I have acquired has proven to be foundational to the writing of this grammar. Textual data, as described below, has demanded, and provided raw material for, a further depth of analysis. Also, during the course of my three years at the Australian National University, several private trips, and one university sponsored field trip, were made to Epi, providing essential contact with speakers of the language. This contact was also
11 As Newman (1992:2-3) notes, the “human dimensions of fieldwork that affect the researcher are seldom taken up as a point of discussion. ... To judge from the silence...you would think that all linguists are single people without dependents who are able to devote themselves from morning to night figuring out the intricacies of relative clauses or noun classifiers. ... A generally neglected problem is the effect of the fieldwork situation on the children themselves.” Michael Young (pc.) comments on this quote that “there is no longer any silence in anthropology” on such issues of the researcher’s interaction with the research activity.
Chapter 1 Introduction to the study
facilitated when, in March-April 1992, a speaker of Lewo spent seven weeks in Canberra at a Dictionary Workshop.12
1.4. Text corpus
The variety of Lewo data accessed in producing this description has been noted above. The actual text corpus contains 259 separate texts, comprising a total of 113,688 words (around 850 kilobytes). The texts are mostly edited transcriptions of tape-recorded first-person narratives, factual accounts, and traditional stories, and make up about 20 hours of recorded speech.
There are only three members of the Lewo classification of oral literary genre. All “traditional” stories are known as
suniena marua
‘old story '(kastom stori
in Bislama), and encompass all kinds of myth, tale, origin story and so on. Any story of known history is simply asuniena
‘a story'. The third category is known aspakaiwa,
and refers to ‘riddles', of which only a few are currently recounted.13 Two sample texts are given in Appendix 1, and details of all texts (tape reference, orator, orator’s village, title/contents, word count) appear in Appendix 2. A summary of the kinds of texts in the corpus, using an English categorisation, is given in Table 1 below. All of the material has been produced by native speakers (ie. while many of the first person narratives, conversations, letters etc. are directed to me, there are none that were produced by me).12 Sponsored by the Linguistics Department of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies of the Australian National University, and the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
13 Since contact times, and the introduction of written literature, the term tusi (a borrowing) has become used for ‘book’, and lumaki for ‘letter’.
Table 1 : Texts in database G E N R E T E X T S W O R D S % O F C O R P U S o rig in sto ry 16 5391 5 h u m o r o u s story 4 1324 1 m o ra lity sto ry 25 10697 9
tra d itio n a l tale 78 30461 27
first p erso n n a rra tiv e 115 47,662 42
sp eech /serm o n 11 6852 6
in fo rm a l/co n v ersa tio n s 6 10569 9
letters 4 732 1
T O T A L 259 113,688 100
A variety of software tools were used in processing and analysing the lexical database and the text corpus. Early interlinearising and interactive dictionary file development were done with IT (Simons and Versaw 1988), while more recently SHOEBOX (Wimbish 1990) was used for this purpose. FIESTA (Alsop and Johnston 1990) was used for all concordance searches and sorted outputs from the text corpus.
1.5. Overview of description
Before the technical description of Lewo begins, the following chapter (Chapter 2) places the language in the wider context of its geographical, social, and linguistic setting. The locations and population of Lewo speakers are given, and all known previous description of the language is surveyed. Modem theories about its historical development are also mentioned.
The phonology of Lewo is covered in Chapter 3. Mainly, the segmental inventory is described, but other matters like stress, phonotactics, syllabification, and morphophonemics are included.
A short overview of the main typological features of Lewo is given in Chapter 4, along with a summary of the word class categories that will be identified as the description proceeds. Problems associated with the identification of these classes are also mentioned.
The two main word classes, nominals (Chapter 5) and verbs (Chapter 6), are more fully described in their own chapters. One particular feature of Lewo verbs, the alternation of the initial consonant to mark the distinction of realis-irrealis mood, is presented in Chapter 7. Another word class (traditionally known as the class of interrogative pronouns or adjectives) is, perhaps
Chapter 1 Introduction to the study
for the first time in the description of a language, given the name “epistememe”, and described in Chapter 8.
The next three chapters, 9 to 11, cover phrase structure: in turn, the structure and function of noun phrases, verb phrases, and prepositional phrases are presented.
The important topic of verb valence and transitivity is integrated into the description of clause structure in Chapter 12. That chapter covers the main types of verbal clauses, as well as clauses with nominal predicates.
Lewo speakers frequently serialise verbs into complex serial verb constructions both within the verb level constituent itself (ie. at the layer of the nucleus of the clause; Chapter 13), and at the verb phrase level (ie. at the layer of the core of the clause; Chapter 14). This is now recognised as a pervasive structural feature of the languages of the region, and its frequency, complexity, and functionality in Lewo warrant the significant amount of space accorded its description here. Some grammatical processes and categories (eg. aspect, interclausal logical relations, comparison) that surface in languages in various ways are encoded in Lewo as serial constructions. Another of these is complementation, and its description in Lewo is handled as part of the discussion of core layer serialisation in Chapter 14.
I will claim that the standard negative clause construction in Lewo contains a feature that appears to be unique in the known languages of the world, and to explore this fully, a single chapter is devoted to the description of negation (Chapter 15).
In the final chapter (Chapter 16), aspects of higher level structures are detailed. Sentences (including complex sentences with relative clauses) are described, as are some interclausal relationships that are expressed in Lewo at this level. This chapter also presents some interesting aspects of the structure of Lewo discourse.
The description concludes with several appendices. The first, Appendix 1, is made up of two sample texts, which I have interlinearised using the same morpheme glosses as found throughout the chapters that follow. Appendix 2 gives the details of the textual database as mentioned above. Appendix 3 contains copies of some early Lewo word lists, and annotations on them. After the Bibliography, an Index is also included, which is intended to assist the reader to locate various Lewo words and particles that are used throughout the text, as well as instances of various technical terms and topics, and also the locations at which various works by other authors are cited.
CHAPTER 2 : THE LEWO LANGUAGE AND ITS SPEAKERS
This chapter describes from a number of perspectives the setting in which the Lewo language is found. This includes non-linguistic details relating to the community of its speakers, and something of the wider socio-cultural and linguistic environment in which the language operates (§2.1), as well as the specifically linguistic environment (§2.2). Previous studies o f Lewo, or studies incorporating Lewo data, are detailed (§2.3), along with a presentation of approaches that have been taken on the question of what the language’s genetic source and relationships might be (§2.4). Some notes on Lewo dialectology are also included (§2.5).