A Grammar of Paluai

The Language of Baluan Island, Papua New Guinea

Dineke Schokkin

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110675221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is the first comprehensive description of Paluai, an Oceanic Austronesian language spoken on Baluan Island in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. Based on extensive field research, the grammar covers all linguistic levels, including phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, while paying particular attention to pragmatics and discourse practices.

This is the first comprehensive description of Paluai, a language from the underdescribed Admiralties subgroup, a first-order branch of Oceanic (Austronesian). Paluai is spoken on Baluan Island in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, by two to three thousand people.

The grammar is based on extensive field research by the author and covers all linguistic levels. After a general introduction of its socio-cultural context, the language's phonology is discussed, followed by two chapters on its parts of speech, divided by open and closed word classes. Following chapters address topics such as the structure of the noun phrase, verbal and non-verbal clauses, grammatical relations, serial verb constructions, mood, negation and clause combining. The final chapter provides an in-depth discussion of pragmatics and discourse practices relevant to Paluai, illustrated through two narrative texts that are included integrally at the end of the book.

This grammar is of interest to scholars working on Austronesian languages, particularly those of the New Guinea region, and those working on linguistic typology. It is also relevant to those interested in the history, languages and cultures of this region more generally.

1 The language and its context

1.1 Introduction

Baluan is a small island located south-east of the main island of Manus Province in Papua New Guinea (PNG); see Figure 1. PNG has the highest rate of linguistic diversity in the world in terms of number of unrelated language phyla (Nettle 1999). Manus Province, located north-east of the PNG mainland, consists of the relatively large Manus Island (commonly referred to as the “big place” or “mainland” within the province) and a large number of surrounding islands. In the province, around 30 languages are spoken, all of which belong to the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family (Lynch, Ross, and Crowley 2002: 10).

Two languages are spoken on Baluan Island: Titan (ISO 639-3: ttv), which is also spoken in several locations on Manus Island and on a number of other islands in the province, and Paluai, more commonly known as Pam-Baluan (ISO 639-3: blq) (Simons and Fennig 2018). Although the latter name is more commonly known to the wider world, native speakers prefer to use the autodenomination Paluai to refer to their island, language and group identity. This practice will be followed throughout this work.¹ Figures from the 2011 Census show the total number of inhabitants of Balopa LLG (consisting of Baluan, Lou and Pam islands) to be 3,516 (National Statistical Office Papua New Guinea 2014). Including expatriate speakers, the number of Paluai speakers can be estimated to fall somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000.

The languages spoken in Manus Province belong to the Admiralties cluster, a higher-order subgroup of Oceanic (Lynch et al. 2002: 94). In contrast to the Oceanic subgroup as a whole, which is relatively well represented in the literature compared to various other language families, very little is known about the Admiralties languages: “the language situation [here] is complex and remains poorly understood” (Lynch et al. 2002: 123).

In this chapter a background to the grammatical description of Paluai will be given. First, general sociolinguistic information about the language will be provided, followed by a brief discussion of the sociocultural context; for a more exhaustive discussion, see Schokkin (2018). Next, an overview of the genetic affiliation of Paluai and existing sources on neighbouring languages is given. The final section of the chapter discusses data collection and methodology.

Figure 1: Language map of Manus Province.

1.2 Sociolinguistic situation

The language described in this work is spoken in two locations: on Baluan Island and on nearby Pam Island (see Figure 1). There are minor lexical differences between the variety spoken on Baluan and the one spoken on Pam, but they are probably not sufficient to classify the varieties as different dialects. Native speakers insist that the varieties spoken on Baluan and Pam are the same. In addition, inhabitants of the two islands regard their customs as very much alike, and there is considerable intermarriage. The data on which the current description is based were collected exclusively on Baluan Island; I will therefore refer to the language variety as “Paluai” throughout the work, in accordance with the wishes of the Baluan speech community, as mentioned above. However, the reader should keep in mind that most of the description applies to the Pam variety as well.

On nearby Lou Island, a closely related variety is spoken that is commonly known as Lou (ISO 639-3: loj) (Simons and Fennig 2018). This variety is considered to have dialectical variation between villages, but the distinctions are minor and mainly of a phonological and lexical nature. In fact, distinctions between Lou and Paluai are minor as well, and probably also mainly phonological and lexical. Based on data in Stutzman (1997), it is estimated that the lexicons of the Baon dialect of Lou and of Paluai overlap for about 80–90%, and that there is very little grammatical difference. There are regular phonological correspondences between the two varieties; see Ross (1988) for more on sound correspondences between Admiralties languages. Paluai speakers consider Lou culture to be related to Paluai, but with some pronounced differences. Thus it can be said that Lou and Paluai are considered separate languages based primarily on cultural and political, rather than linguistic, grounds.

All members of the community on Baluan Island acquire Paluai from birth as their native language, with a few exceptions such as in-married women and the Titan speakers in Mouk village. In addition, often from a very early age, people acquire Tok Pisin, an English lexifier creole and an official language of PNG. English, although gaining ground as the language of mass media, government and education, is not commonly acquired in a naturalistic setting by people on the island, and people’s first exposure to English occurs usually when they enter primary school around the age of eight. For expatriate Paluai, the situation is often very different. For them, because they are not part of a stable Paluai speech community, the pressure of Tok Pisin and English is much greater, in particular within mixed marriages. Children growing up away from Baluan Island often acquire only a passive command of the language, and have Tok Pisin (or sometimes English) as their first language. On Baluan Island, people of the older generations (about age fifty and upwards) often show at least a passive command of either Titan, Lou or both, and sometimes of some other Manus languages, due to long-standing contacts between various neighbouring speech communities. These forms of passive bilingualism are on their way out, since Tok Pisin is increasingly used as a lingua franca between language groups. See Schokkin (2017) for more on Paluai-Tok Pisin contact and its implications.

1.3 Sociocultural background

Linguistic research on the languages of Manus Province is relatively scarce, especially when compared to the considerable amount of anthropological work that has been done. Anthropologists have traditionally distinguished three main groups of people: the Usiai people, who predominantly live away from the coast on the main island; the Moanus (or Titan), who traditionally did not own land and live in stilt houses on the coast; and the Matankor people of the surrounding islands (Nevermann 1934; Bühler 1935). The distinction is emic and was given further credence by the early ethnographers; as a matter of fact, only the Titan can be regarded as a single ethnolinguistic unit. Margaret Mead (1930, 1934, 1956) wrote about child rearing and cultural change among the Titan people of Pere. Other classic texts are Fortune (1965) on religion, Schwartz (1963) on the Paliau Movement, areal culture, cultural totemism and cargo cults, and Carrier and Carrier (1989) on kinhip, exchange and trade. Valuable work on material culture in Manus has been done by Ohnemus (2002); other recent anthropological sources on Manus are Wanek (1996), Dalsgaard (2009) and, of particular importance to Baluan, the work carried out by Ton Otto: e.g. Otto (1991, 1992, 1997, 2002, 2008), Otto and Pedersen (2005), and Dalsgaard and Otto (2011).

The Baluan population is spread over six villages, most of them on the north coast, while a large group of people live elsewhere because they are working in urban areas (Otto 1992: 264).

1.4 Genetic affiliation

As mentioned, Paluai is a member of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Austronesian is divided into at least ten primary subgroups, of which nine are located in Taiwan and the other one, Malayo-Polynesian, consists of the remainder of Austronesian languages (Blust 2013: 29). Due to the large number of first-order subgroups on Taiwan, the latter is now uncontroversially believed to be the homeland of the Austronesian family. Multiple waves of migration have led to the spread of the language family across the globe. Migration basically went from west to east, with the farthest of the Polynesian islands reached by about 1000 A.D. (Lynch 1998: 56). The Admiralties group was established as a primary subgroup of Oceanic based on shared innovations as compared to the protolanguage (Ross 1988; Lynch et al. 2002), following the conventional methodology of establishing subgroups in historical linguistics.

Intensive contact with non-Austronesian “Papuan” languages has led to major changes in some of the Oceanic languages of Melanesia. Although there are no non-Austronesian languages spoken in Manus Province at present, archeological evidence indicates that it was occupied at the time the Austronesian speakers arrived (Ambrose 2002), making it plausible that substrate phenomena still exist in the Oceanic languages spoken nowadays.

There are a number of publications about historical phonology and linguistics of the area by Blust (1981, 1998, 2007, 2008) and Ross (1988). Ross (1988: 316) divides the Admiralties cluster into two second-order groups:

1. the western Admiralties, containing Wuvulu and Aua, Seimat, and now extinct Kaniet;
2. the eastern Admiralties, divisible into two third-order subgroups:
   1. the south-eastern Admiralties, comprising Pak-Tong, Baluan-Pam, Lou, Lenkau, Penchal and Nauna;
   2. the Manus subgroup, which includes all languages of Manus Island and its remaining offshore islands.

1.5 Existing descriptions of neighbouring languages

A preliminary sociolinguistic overview of the language situation in Manus was given by Schooling and Schooling (1980). The only other Admiralties language with a published full-length grammar is Loniu (Hamel 1994). Mussau is a language spoken on the islands of the St. Matthias Group, located east of Man...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions and abbreviations
• 1 The language and its context
• 2 Phonology
• 3 Word classes I: open classes
• 4 Word classes II: closed classes
• 5 The noun phrase
• 6 Predicates I: verbal predicates
• 7 Predicates II: non-verbal and copula predicates
• 8 Grammatical relations and valency
• 9 Serial verb constructions
• 10 Speech act distinctions and polarity
• 11 Clausal relations and clause combining
• 12 Pragmatics and discourse practices
• Appendix I Recordings metadata
• Appendix II Texts
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index