A Sketch Grammar of Kopar

A Language of New Guinea

William A. Foley

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110791549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Kopar is a very moribund, close to extinct, language spoken in three villages at the mouth of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. This is the only description of the language available. It also discusses areas where rapid language shift is affecting the structure of Kopar.

Although the period of fieldwork was necessarily short, this book provides as comprehensive a description as possible of the grammatical structure of this complex and fascinating language. It is quite thorough and detailed and goes well beyond what is normally considered a sketch grammar. It covers all the phenomena essential to description and comparison and gives clear, typologically sound definitions and explanations. The grammar is written with the research interests of language typologists and comparative grammarians foremost in mind.

Typologically, Kopar can be described as a split ergative, polysynthetic language. The language lacks nominal case marking so ergativity or lack thereof is signaled by verbal agreement affixes. Tenses and moods which describe as yet unrealized events, like future and imperative, pattern accusatively for agreement affixes, while those express realized events, like past and present, pattern ergatively. In addition, the ergative case schema is overlaid by a direct-inverse inflectional schema determined by a person hierarchy, a feature Kopar shares with other languages in its Lower Sepik family. As a polysynthetic language, incorporation of sentential elements like temporals, locationals, adverbials and verbals is extensive, though noun incorporation is not.

Sadly, this work is all the documentation we will likely ever have of Kopar, a language of potentially very high theoretical interest, given its rare typological profile. It will certainly be of interest to language typologists and comparative grammarians, and anyone who wants to explore the range of language variation

Chapter 1 Introduction

Kopar is a now moribund language formerly spoken in three villages at or near the mouth of the Sepik River in the northern swampy lowlands of Papua New Guinea. Kopar is one of the six languages of the Lower Sepik family within the larger Lower Sepik-Ramu family (Foley 2017a), and is most closely related to the language to its immediate west, Murik, with which it forms a sub-group (see the comparative wordlist in Appendix 1). Figure 1 presents the languages of the Lower Sepik family and their relationships, a language family whose internal diversity is roughly on the order of Germanic:

Figure 1: The Lower Sepik language family.

Kopar was spoken in three villages, Kopar (3.862426°S, 144.525852°E), located right at the mouth of the Sepik River, Singrin (3.939457°S, 144.430355°E), located about thirty kilometers upriver and Wongan (3.999326°S, 144.532123°E), found in the mangrove swamps to the southeast of Kopar village, perhaps ten kilometers as the crow flies. I write ‘was spoken’ because the language was already moribund twenty-­five years ago when I and an honors student of mine, Stephen Hill, did our fieldwork and hardly used in daily life. Language shift was already very far advanced in the mid 1990s, with Tok Pisin already having nearly entirely usurped the functions of Kopar. It appears that large scale language shift already started to occur in the 1960s in Kopar, about ten to twenty years earlier than elsewhere in the lower and middle Sepik River regions. I suspect very few fluent speakers remain today, perhaps less than two dozen across the three villages, although that is an unsure estimate, and even they would rarely use the language. Certainly, use of the language has by now even more retreated in daily life.

The moribund state of the language even twenty-five years ago created problems in fieldwork similar to language salvage work. Speakers were sometimes unsure of correct forms in the complex verbal morphology and gave conflicting forms when they were elicited, although multiple checking usually allowed a consensus to be arrived at. When possible, elicited forms have always been checked against the spontaneous forms provided in the four narrative texts for accuracy. It is also possible, of course, that there was extensive variation in forms employed across speakers even in such a small speech community, but the very limited time span of fieldwork prevented any serious study of language variation, either idiosyncratic or gender or age based. Because of these difficulties, in this short grammar I have identified areas where analyses need to be regarded as provisional, pending further data should their collection ever prove to be possible. Furthermore, the whole amount of fieldwork time devoted to Kopar was only around a month, as this was a side project to my main research on the documentation of the neighboring distantly related Watam language, so data on the language are limited in any case. The data were almost all collected in Kopar village, with a small amount in Wongan village; in addition, I have a word list of some hundred items (Abbott 1985) collected in the Singrin dialect. There is some, relatively minor, dialect differentiation between the three villages. This description is based on the dialect of Kopar village, but I will occasionally comment on differences in the Wongan dialect. The data consist of word lists, nominal paradigms, verbal paradigms across tenses and moods for intransitive and transitive verbs, basic clause permutations and three narrative texts of moderate length and one shorter narrative text. Recordings of all field materials have been deposited with PARADISEC: https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/WF1. Generally, a grammatical description would require more than this. And a month is certainly insufficient to give a full description of any language, and this especially holds true of one so complex and morphologically rich as Kopar. But given the quite unusual and striking typological features of the language, its importance in reconstructing the comparative grammar of the Lower Sepik family, and the fact that further documentation is unlikely to occur or sadly even be possible, I offer this sketch grammar to the linguistics research community and especially to Papuanists. Unfortunately given the sparse data, there will be gaps in the description offered here and almost certainly some errors and overgeneralizations. Like all Lower Sepik languages Kopar is very morphologically complex (see Foley (1991, 2017b) on Yimas), and there is no way this short grammar nor the limited data collected can do justice to that. In particular, some of the rich incorporating and derivational morphology of the verb undoubtedly remains undocumented or underanalyzed. For instance, kawari- ‘bury’ and kawarumbut- ‘throw down from a height’ are clearly derivationally related, but the data are insufficient to ascertain their morphological structure. Similarly, niɲja- ‘send’, paneɲja- ‘aim to thrust’, ruruɲja ‘shake’ and təmeɲja- ‘tell’ are derived from ni- ‘put inside’, pane- ‘jump’, ruru- shake’ and təme- ‘tell’ plus a formative -ɲja, but the function of this morpheme remains obscure. The extensive truncation of vowels, particularly /a/, across morpheme boundaries in the suffixal sequence of morphemes in the incorporating morphology of the language presented some difficulties in determining the underlying forms of some of the morphemes. The forms presented constitute the current best hypotheses as to what these are, and further work, if any should ever be possible, might result in minor revisions to these. Still I am confident that the description of the language offered here is broadly accurate. Most importantly and as my main motivation, this fascinating language deserves to be described at least as much as possible before it disappears entirely from this world, and that day is not very far off.

Ethnographically, Kopar culture is very similar to that of their Murik relatives; for good descriptions of Murik culture see Lipset (1997) and Schmidt (1922–1923, 1926, 1933). Local oral legends and language distribution tell us a bit about the origins of the Kopar language. Note the following map of the geographical distribution of the Lower Sepik languages (here the Kanda language is labeled Angoram, an alternative name for this language after the district administrative center located in its territory):

Map 1: Distribution of the Lower Sepik languages.

Note that almost all Lower Sepik languages lie upriver from Kopar (not surprisingly, as Kopar village is situated at the mouth of the Sepik River). The sole exception, Murik, with which it forms a subgroup (see the comparative wordlist of the two languages in Appendix 1), is located in the mangrove swamps to its west; many shared innovations between the two languages demonstrate that they indeed form a ­subgroup. Given this fact, the ancestral language spoken by Murik and Kopar, ­Proto-Murik-Kopar, would have constituted a single speech community before their split into two. Legends of the Yimas, located far upriver as Map 1 indicates, clearly narrate a breakup of an ancient speech community including them and the Murik and a consequent migration downriver by the Murik-Kopar ancestors from the homeland of this community which was situated in the high ground upriver from the current location of Yimas village (in confirmation, Chambri legends also tell of a similar migration, this time upriver, from the same area). This clearly indicates an upriver origin of the Kopar language. Legends of the Watam, a village less than ten kilometers to the east of Kopar village right on the coast, add another piece to the puzzle. The Watam language is a Lower Ramu language and its closest relatives like Kaian and Mbore lie still further to its east. Watam legends relate that their ancestors and those of the inhabitants of Kopar village were originally a single community which moved into their current territory from the east. Through barter they arranged to purchase this territory from the village of Singrin, a Kopar speaking village. The ancestors of Watam villagers and Kopar villagers then quarreled, and the ancestral Kopar villagers moved to the current site of Kopar village and adopted the language spoken in Singrin, while ancestral Watam villagers preserved their Lower Ramu language. Singrin seems likely to be the ultimate source village of the three Kopar speaking villages, though the origin of Wongan village is unclear. Overall, dialect data suggest that Wongan and Kopar are closer, and most likely Wongan hived off from a common earlier community and established itself deeper into the mangrove swamps, but this is by no means certain. A split of Wongan from Singrin village is also plausible. Singrin village now sits directly on the main Sepik River on its right bank, but at first contact by German explorers (Claas and Roscoe 2009), it was not located there, but on a small southern tributary of the main river, most likely for easier defense from ongoing intervillage warfare. Both its earlier and current location place it closer to the site of Wongan village than Kopar village is. Also, according to these early German reports (Class and Roscoe 2009), there was an additional fourth Kopar speaking village Potar also along the main Sepik River between present day Kopar and Singrin villages, but this has now been long abandoned.

In terms of its typological profile Kopar is a strongly agglutinative, moderately polysynthetic language, comparable to its sister Yimas (see Foley 2017c). If we adopt the diagnostics for polysynthesis proposed in Foley (2017b), Kopar does qualify as a polysynthetic language, but perhaps not to the degree of some other well known exemplars such as Iroquoian or Caddoan languages. The three diagnostic characteristics of polysynthesis suggested in Foley (2017b) are polypersonalism, head marking and incorporation or dependent-head synthesis (Mattissen 2003). Polypersonalism is the expression of core arguments by agreeing bound pronominals on their governing verb and typically goes hand in hand with head marking. On this, Kopar scores moderately. While basic transitive verbs usually only have agreement for one core argument, so agreement doesn’t really qualify as ‘poly’, they do agree normally through multiple exponence, by spreading out agreement over prefixes and suffixes, so that perhaps rates as ‘poly’. Further there is a set of dative pronominal agreement suffixes that commonly occur on verbs, so such verbs do exhibit fuller polypersonalism, with potential agreement for two participants. Besides verbal agreement affixes, Kopar has other characteristics of head marking languages like lack of nominal case marking (Nichols 1986, 2017) and an array of affixes adjusting a verb’s arguments, both detransitivizing and transitivizing. Incorporation is also found in Kopar, with rare noun incorporation but much more extensive incorporation of temporals, adverbials and directionals, as well as exuberant verb incorporation. Overall Kopar can be classified as a moderately polysynthetic language.

The phonology of Kopar is fairly typical of its area in the Lower Sepik-Ramu region and shares a number of phonological properties with its distantly related neighbor Watam. With respect to morphology, nouns are simple and verbs are complex, with multiple categories potentially expressed, but at a minimum usually must include tense and person-number of one core argument, subject or object depending on their relative ranking in person on the Animacy Hierarchy (Silverstein 1976;Dixon 1979); hence Kopar like all Lower Sepik family languages belongs to the class of direct-inverse languages. Kopar is more regularly subject-object-verb in clausal word order than Yimas and some other Papuan languages, though permutations do occasionally occur in texts, and postpositional phrases and locatives can follow the verb. This comparative strictness may be due to gaps in the pronominal agreement system for the verb. Clause linkage is mainly done by coordination and subordination, with non-finite constructions for the latter type. Coordination can be simple justaposition of full clauses or the more typical Papuan clause chaining, with specialized dependent forms of verbs.

Chapter 2 Phonology

2.1 Phonemes and allophones

Kopar has a somewhat typical phonemic inventory for the languages of the area. The consonants are set out in Figure 2:

Figure 2: Kopar consonantal phonemes.

Note that there is no voiceless lamino-palatal stop; as is common in Sepik area languages the /s/ phoneme replaces that. Evidence that supports this claim is that a word initial /s/ following a word final nasal is often realized...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Phonology
• Chapter 3 Word classes
• Chapter 4 Nouns and noun phrases
• Chapter 5 Verbal morphology
• Chapter 6 Clause structure
• Chapter 7 Interclausal relations
• Index