Nakanai syntax

Abstract

This thesis gives an account of the syntax of Nakanai, an Oceanic Austronesian language of West New Britain. The study takes the form of a reference guide to the contrastive structures and major syntactic features of Nakanai. Concomitantly, selected issues in the grammar of Oceanic languages and in syntactic theory are discussed in terms of their manifestation in Nakanai, as they are encountered in the discussion of the Nakanai data. Chapter one critically reviews past and present research on the Nakanai language. There is a lack in the field of Oceanic languages of a searching synchronic account of the grammar of a New Britain language. The task of attempting to provide such a description would appear best undertaken set against an understanding of previous comparative research and at least an awareness of the variable aspects of language, in terms of social and regional factors, as they bear upon Nakanai. These matters are discussed in the first chapter, along with the goals of the study. Chapters two and three deal with the semantics and syntax respectively of the Nakanai clause, attempting to demonstrate that case frames have to be defined language-specifically, with attendant separation of role and contextual factors in clause constituent analysis. Consequent upon this approach is the rejection of putatively universal relational notions such as Subject and Object. Modality elements and modality contours in the clause are discussed in chapter three, along with the syntactic configurations of the intransitive and transitive clauses. Chapter two contains the definitions of nuclear and peripheral cases, the analysis of case frames, and discussions of complex relationships such as reflexive, reciprocal and comparative. In chapter four the influence of thematic organisation of discourse on the speaker's selection of topicalisation options in sentence encoding is considered. Two distinct kinds of topicalisation are discerned, highlighting, utilising fronting of constituents, and foregrounding, in which determiners mark thematic nouns. The former strategy introduces new themes, while the latter focusses already introduced participants in the discourse, thus providing coherence. Relativisation is seen to be a foregrounding (i.e. a focussing) strategy. The role of demonstratives, deictics, and pronouns in foregrounding is considered in some detail. Partitioned and juxtaposed clauses are also discussed. Chapters five and six deal with the basic structures, the VP and the NP, respectively and their constituents. The influence of context does not significantly affect the analysis of the VP, but comes very much into play in the NP in chapter six. In the VP discussion, matters such as the modification of the head verb by adverbs of manner and intensity, aspectual inflections, derivations and verbal compounds are considered in some detail. Inflectional and derivational aspects-of reduplication are separately discussed, especially the formation of continuative/habituative aspect and the derivation of intransitive verbs by reduplication, the form of which is phonologically conditioned. In chapter six the modifier NP is analysed in terms of the conditioning of constituent optionality and ordering with regard to the head noun according to contextual factors. A contextual concept of cohesion in the NP is put forward, competing with the syntactic conditioning factor of bondedness. Also discussed in chapter six is the inalienable possession system in Nakanai. This is seen to be a two-class 'gender' type of system, unlike the contextually-determined multiple systems of possession which operate in many Oceanic languages. Only 'dominant' possession, in which the actor is operative with regard to the patient, is encoded in Nakanai, there being no Polynesian-type 'subordinate' possession. Noun compounding, articles (personal and common), modifiers and deverbal nouns are also considered in some detail in this chapter. Serial verbs, discussed 1n chapter seven, encode semantic notions of range, direction, location and motion. The morphologically and syntactically distinct set of compound serial verbs which I term 'coverbs', encoding either location or motion, are analysed according to a view of the VP as a 'wave'. That is, particles and auxiliary elements with some of the grammatical characteristics of verbs reflect the diachronic development of these forms from verbs, a view which challenges the notion of discrete clear-cut categories in syntactic analysis. Coverbs are analysed uniformly with other serial verbs, it being argued on the basis of standard coordinated constructions in the language that a clause chain with obligatory coreferential deletion of the clause topics occurs in constructions in which serial verbs follow main verbs in closeknit sequence. In chapter eight complex interclausal relationships are considered which have to do with those constructions which are clearly of a conjoined or subordinating type as against the merged and close-knit types of construction in chapter seven. Dependent subordinate clauses are analysed as sentence topics encoding presuppositions of condition, sequence, reason or result. All types of complementation are found to be subsumed under the embedded quotative type of sentence, there being direct quotation, indirect quotation, reported thought and intentional variants of this sentence type. Coordinate sentences are shown to be of a range of varieties such as conjunctive sequence, conjunctive association, disjunction and juxtaposition, depending on semantic factors. The concluding comments of the study are found in chapter nine, which seeks to review major points and comment briefly on the possible origins of the Nakanai language, relating salient aspects of the grammar to pertinent aspects of Proto-Oceanic grammar as it is presently understood. Nakanai is regarded as innovative in the deletion, simplification and reanalysis of basic Proto-Oceanic grammatical categories, and in the light of comments of comparative linguists, it is suggested that such changes may have occurred with emigration from an intermediary homeland east of New Britain. Show more