Assigned reading summary
Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview
Before I start, I want to ask you to understand some possible grammatical (or other) mistakes and errors. I am an exchange student for one semester, so I think sometimes my writing may sound awkward.
Grammatical features
* Pronouns
Oceanic languages usually have considerably complicated pronoun systems.
1. One of the commonest features of Oceanic languages is that most of them distinguish inclusive first person and exclusive first person. It means that they use different pronouns for English “we”, depending on whether they refer to the speaker and listener (I + you) or the speaker and some other individual (I + he/she/it/they).
2. Distinguishing number is also different from that of English. The commonest one is the three-way distinction between singular, dual (only two), and plural number, even though there are also two-way distinction (singular and plural) and even four-way distinction (singular, dual, trial, and plural).
3. Apart from these independent pronouns, Oceanic languages have other pronominal forms such as subject markers (there are distinct subject pronouns which mark the person and number of the subject), object markers, and possessive affixes (mark the person and number of the possessor).
* Nouns and Noun Phrases.
1. Many Oceanic languages do not clearly distinguish nouns from other parts of speech (The Fijian word tangane can function as a noun meaning ‘man’, as a verb meaning ‘to be male’, and as an adjective meaning ‘male’).
2. They don’t change form to mark singular and plural. Rather, plurality is expressed by adding affixes, by a subject or object marker, or by other variation like vowel lengthening.
3. Articles (in English the and a/an) are used to mark a noun as definite or singular indefinite in English, and even though most of Oceanic languages also have articles, some languages don’t have any articles.
4. Demonstratives are words that locate the noun in space and/or time (in English this/these and that/those), and English has a two-way distinction. On contrast, most of Oceanic languages have a three-way distinction: proximate (near the speaker), intermediate (near the addressee), and distant (away from both).
5. Two major adjectives functions in most Oceanic languages are that they occur within a noun phrase, following the noun, and that they function as stative verbs. Oceanic languages’ commonest numerals are decimal (base 10) or quinary (base 5) systems, but there are also variations. While numerals are counting exact number, Quantifiers are used to express less exact quantities like “some, many, all, and few).
6. About noun phrase structure, in the general order of noun phrase, articles come before nouns, while adjectives and demonstratives follow the noun (in Labu, gwa kege ani – canoe small one ).
* Sentences.
1. Unlike English, Oceanic languages do not necessarily require at least one verb. Instead, there is no verb in nominal sentences, which consist of a subject and a predicate (usually a noun phrase). 2. Most Oceanic languages are accusative (the object of a transitive verb is marked differently. E.g. an object “the man” is marked as him), but some others are ergative (the subject of a transitive verb is marked in one way, while the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are marked differently by the absolutive case).
3. The basic phrase order of subject, object, and the verb within the simple verbal sentence varies from language to language. In most case, the subject goes first, followed by the verb and then object, but still some has S(O)V, VOS, or VSO order.
4. The commonest patter for negation in Oceanic languages is to be marked by a preverbal negative particle such as “not”. Another major way is to be marked by a discontinuous morpheme (two separate particles occur in a sentence at the same time).
5. Some Oceanic languages use postpositions (come after the noun) to mark the same kinds of grammatical functions as prepositions especially when the basic sentence order is SOV.
* Comments
Since this chapter is all about numerous and detailed grammatical features, it can be somewhat boring to read all the enumerated features. I tried to focus on just major and common ones, but it is still long.
During work, I found out that Oceanic languages have much in common. Even though there are also many different features, considering the long history, it is still amazing. It was also interesting that even when some grammatical feature is missing in a language, in most case there is another grammatical device that can substitute the same feature, resulting in making all the languages more similar.
Works Cited:
Lynch, John. Pacific Languages: an Introduction. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998. Chapter 3 (p. 100-165).
Pacific language center http://www.pacificlanguage.com/?page=cantonese
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7 comments:
Hi Siena,
Thank you so much for your very concise post of chapter 6. I agree with you that it was somewhat boring to read, but I was also slightly overwhelmed by the material. You have managed to distill it down to understandable content! It is no wonder with over 1,200 languages spoken in our area of focus that there would be so many rules and exceptions to those rules! It’s pretty amazing to see the similarities among all of these languages, and analyzing the grammar gives more insight into how the languages evolved. I don’t know about you, but I know that I will also find it helpful to hear the lecture on this topic for further clarification and insight.
I agree--for the most part it was a bit heavy trying to understand grammatical terminology and comprehend the analysis of the content. However, I think you did an exceptional job simplifying and breaking down the components of the chapter, including their terminology with your understanding. I agree with Lisa, that it is amazing there are so many rules and ways to go about communicating. Anyways, great summary and I plan on using it in the future for quick referencing.
Learning a different language or even learning the linguistic characteristics of a language lends to a better appreciation for our own language. I know before I started studying other languages, I never even thought about how we construct sentences and such. As I was reading the chapter I tried to translate the sentences first and it was quite difficult to figure out what the right verb tense and sentence structure was for each sentence. By the end of the chapter, I think I caught on to it, but I definitely have a greater appreciation for the complexities of language construction.
Good job in outlining and summarizing the important points such a detailed chapter!
I think the presence of the inclusive and exclusive pronouns is interesting.The pronoun structure of Tagalog took me a while to understand and I tended to mix up those exclusive and inclusive pronouns.
For example:
1st person plural inclusive = tayo
1st person plural exclusive = kami
“Wala tayong bigas.” = "We (you and I) don't have rice."
“Wala kaming bigas” = "We (someone else and I, but not you) don't have rice."
I wonder what the functionality of this is? It does make speaking a little faster because it indicates to the listener who you are talking about already. Regardless of function, this striking commonality between Pacific languages is really interesting.
Thank for your summary! It really helped to break down all of the sentence structures that were in Ch.6. I did find it very interesting that these languages seem to distinguish between how many people are being spoken about or to. I guess in English we don't put very much thought in to how many people we are talking about or if we are excluding or including the speaker. Or it could be in English that we just know how much and whether or not the speaker is being included. I've been taking Hawaiian for a few years now, but I remember in the beginning it took me awhile to get the concept of we exclusive and we inclusive. I agree with Kary that perhaps it's a faster and easier way in indicating who is being talked about.
A lot of the Pacific languages have things in common. After reading Chapter 6, I was a little confused but your summary clarified things a little more. Languages are very complex and require a lot of "background" information in order to fully learn and understand them. To do this, you have to break things down into different categories. It's similar to a math problem, in the sense that you need to work out the problem in little steps.
Language has evolved so much over the past thousands of the years....
This chapter was long and covered a lot of material. I was confused, so I was glad we went over some of it last lecture. I enjoyed reading your blog and would like to comment on your sentence section. I always thought all languages followed the same grammatical rules but in a different sequence. I believed all sentences were composed of a noun and verb, and they could change positions and still make sense. In English, I would say my name is Brittany; in Japanese, I would say watashi no namae wa Brittany desu, which literally translates into my name Brittany is. It's in a different order but still contains a noun and verb. However, I was wrong. Pacific languages don't require both a noun and verb to generate a complete sentence.
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