A Grammar of Unua

Elizabeth Pearce

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501500510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The book presents a description of Unua, one of two dialects of Unua-Pangkumu, an Oceanic language of Malakula Island, Vanuatu. Unua has about 700 speakers who are bilinguals using Unua in local interactions and using the national language, Bislama, non-locally, as well as in local public and religious settings.

The description is based on material collected in the field from speakers of different age-groups in the five Unua villages. The data corpus includes a substantial body of material: contemporary translations of the New Testament gospels; audio-recorded transcribed and glossed texts; and elicited material collected with a range of speakers. The analysis includes comparisons with other Malakula languages and is both of typological and historical-comparative interest. The data documentation is substantial and detailed.

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1. Unua

Unua is one of two distinct dialects of Unua-Pangkumu spoken in two separate communities located on the south east coast of Malakula Island (see Maps 1 and 2). The Unua people are based in five villages strung out beside the north-south road which connects the centres of Norsup/Lakatoro in the centre-north and Lamap to the south. In order from north to south the villages names are: Batabbu, Batabong, Penamor, Ruxbo and Black Sands (see Map 2).¹ The five villages are also conventionally referred to respectively as Unua One, Unua Two, Unua Three, Unua Four, Unua Five. Walking time between the most northerly edge of the village of Batabbu and the most southern edge of Black Sands is approximately 40 minutes. The Pangkumu community is located further to the south on the Tisman Peninsula, separated from the Unua area by the Pangkumu river which is about 40 minutes walking time south of the Black Sands village area.²

The traditional name for the Unua settlement area is Anbo and for Pangkumu it is Aur. The name ‘Unua’ is derived from bangon nue ‘mouth river’, the name given to the location of a mission settlement which is currently the site of the Neramb primary school. Land sale documents dated 1896 and 1901³ refer to ‘Onua’, which spelling is also found in Miller (1989).

Within the Unua area there are further najara (clan) groupings. Some of the clan names are: Rangir, Ruxbo, Podes, Xemervet, Bansaret, Xemeror, Batabbu.

The Vanuatu National Population and Housing Census of 1999 shows a total population of 710 for the five Unua villages, as well as Novor, the extension of Penamor:

(1)

Batabbu	111
Batabong	151
Penamor	85
Novor	47
Ruxbo	91
Black Sands	272
Total:	757

Following the strategy adopted in Lynch and Crowley (2001: 5), assuming an annual population increase of 2.8 per cent, the Unua area population in 2011 would come to a total of approximately 1,053.⁴

Whilst Unua is the principal language used in daily interactions in the area, as discussed in section 13.1, all adults and all school age children are fluent speakers of Bislama. Bislama is also the language of choice for certain kinds of (more formal) interactions and in a small number of households (see also section 13.1). Aside from the fact that some Unua people claim that they are able to speak the Pangkumu dialect, except for families and individuals who have moved into the area from outside, it does not seem to be the case that people living in the Unua area have competence in the use of other vernacular languages of Malakula. Interactions between speakers of different vernacular languages are conducted in Bislama. Although schooling in Vanuatu is traditionally conducted in English or French, for adults, only the small numbers who have had some secondary school education have maintained degrees of fluency in either one of these languages, of which there would be only a handful in the Unua area with competency in French.

The economy of the area is basically a subsistence one, but with some cash income derived mostly from the sale of copra and of cacao beans and from some trading in kava. Although Unua is a coastal settlement, it is the land, rather than the sea, that is the most important source of food. Vegetable foods, especially root vegetables, are cultivated in family-owned gardens which also provide many fruits and nuts, along with the variety of tree and plant products used in the construction and embellishment of houses. There are also chickens and pigs, some goats and, in one area, some farmed cattle. There is too some hunting of wild cattle and pigs in the hills beyond the immediate settlement area. Fish are caught around the reefs, also the source of shellfish and squid, but the sea beyond the reefs, although exploited to some extent is not such an important food source for this largely agriculture oriented society.

The Unua area supports one English-language primary school. located at Neramb, the site of an earlier Presbyterian mission. But not all families find the means to ensure that all of their children complete a full programme of primary school education. Attendance at high school requires a greater investment (transport and boarding school fees, the latter up to 20,000 vatu per term) and a considerably smaller proportion of children are able to attend high school and, even fewer, to complete a full course of secondary study. The vast majority of post-school-age young people remain in the area unless they choose to marry into another group. Marriage is also the principal factor in relocations between villages in the Unua area. A small number of Unua people leave the area for work elsewhere.

1.2. Unua data

1.2.1. Earlier sources

Pangkumu versions of books of the New Testament were produced from the Presbyterian missions at the end of the Nineteenth century and the early Twentieth century: Morton (n.d. [1892]): Mark; Morton (1987): John; Paton (1903): Acts; Paton (1913): Luke. Morton (1982) is a Primer, also in Pangkumu. Morton 1891 is a short sketch grammar of Pangkumu with occasional comments on different forms noted for Unua (referred to as ‘Ru-humbu’ dialect).

From my perusal of the Morton grammar, whilst a number of features described in this grammar correspond to those found in present-day Unua, there are also a very large number of differences. Although I have not as yet carried out an intensive study of the Pangkumu New Testament texts, these texts appear to me to be much more opaque than what one would expect from material in a dialect which is supposed to be comprehensible to Unua speakers, even with respect to material that dates from more than a century ago. However, from my knowledge of Unua, glossed and translated texts of four Pangkumu stories communicated to me by Jean-Michel Charpentier are more readily understandable (Charpentier (2003–2004).

The material from the collection of the Australian linguist Arthur Capell (1902–1986) which has been archived in PARADISEC⁵ includes some Unua material that was supplied by Joyce Trudinger in 1957.⁶ I have worked through this material with present-day Unua speakers and the thus created modern version corresponding to the 1957 material has now also been placed with PARADISEC.

Tryon (1976) presents vocabulary for 292 items from 179 locations in Vanuatu. His lists include data from Pangkumu and from Unua. Charpentier (1982) provides some 2,000 items of vocabulary for fifteen 15 southern Malakula languages, including Pangkumu, but not Unua. Some aspects of these data sets are discussed in section 2.6.2 and elsewhere.

1.2.2. Recent data collection

I have collected language data in the Unua area between 2003 and 2011 in a total of seven field trips varying in length between ten days and ten weeks, with an average length of approximately four weeks. CD copies of the audio recordings which I made of stories and of elicitation sessions have been deposited with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VCC). I have also deposited with the VCC typed copies of the glossed and translated texts of all the stories that I have recorded. These materials will also be made ready for deposit with PARADISEC. In the presentation of data in this book I identify the sources of all recorded clause-length data.

Speakers who consented to my recording them agreed that their names should be included with information about the sources of data. The speaker details are included in the Data Coding section.

The contemporary Unua data also include a significant amount of written material that has overwhelmingly been the work of Kalangis Bembe, chief and elder of Ruxbo. Starting in 2004, Kalangis has given himself the project of translating the books of the New Testament into Unua. Up to the present time (mid 2014) he has completed his translations of the four gospels and is part way through Acts. Prior to beginning work on the New Testament he had completed the translation into Unua of 154 hymns. He is also the author of stories written in Unua and preserved in typed format in a booklet, dating from the time that he attended secondary school in Aulua in the 1950s. Kalangis has contributed 19 of the 47 story and oral history texts that I have recorded.⁷ He also created the lyrics for songs in Unua that I recorded with a Ruxbo-based string band, Nemen Sangavur nen Netes (The Ten Seagulls). This material also forms part of the present data base collection.

Along with Dimock (2005) and Keating (2007), publications and conference presentations including Unua data from my collection are: Bembe and Pearce (2005) and Pearce (2007, 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2011 and forthcoming). I have deposited with the VCC an unedited list of approximately Unua 4,000 words, a potential basis for the production of a dictionary of Unua.

In the grammar of Unua that I present in this book, although there are still many questions that remain, I have done my best to do justice to the data that I have collected. I hope also that this work will make a decent contribution in adding to the general understanding of languages of this part of Vanuatu, as well as providing a reasonably comprehensive...

Table of contents

• Pacific Linguistics 647
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Data coding
• List of Tables
• Chapter 1 - Introduction
• Chapter 2 - Phonology
• Chapter 3 - Nouns and pronouns
• Chapter 4 - Noun phrases
• Chapter 5 - Verbs and verb modification
• Chapter 6 - Sentences without verbs
• Chapter 7 - Sentence structure
• Chapter 8 - Subordinate clauses
• Chapter 9 - Coordination
• Chapter 10 - Negation
• Chapter 11 - Questions
• Chapter 12 - Topic and Focus
• Chapter 13 - Unua and Bislama
• Appendix I - Vowels in verb paradigms
• Appendix II - Jirvaren: Two stories
• References
• Language index
• Author index
• Subject index