POSSESSION IN LELEPA, A LANGUAGE OF CENTRAL VANUATU by Sébastien Lacrampe A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics School of Language, Arts and Media Pacific Languages Unit The University of the South Pacific March, 2009 DECLARATION I, Sebastien Lacrampe, declare that this thesis is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge, it contains no material previously published, or substantially overlapping with material submitted for the award of any other degree at any institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the text. The research in this thesis was performed under my supervision and to my knowledge is the sola work of Mr. Sebastien Lacrampe. ABSTRACT This thesis studies possession in Lelepa, a language from the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian, spoken in Central Vanuatu. Investigating this particular feature of the language was achieved by collecting original data from Lelepa speakers. Language data is presented in the form of interlinearised examples taken from a corpus of texts and elicitation notes. Data was collected between 2006 and 2008 during fieldtrips to Lelepa and Mangaliliu. The core of the study is devoted to the possessive system of Lelepa. Like many other Oceanic languages, Lelepa has direct and indirect possessive constructions. This thesis shows that the direct possessive construction formally consists of a possessed noun to which a possessor suffix attaches. It encodes possession of semantic domains such as body parts, body products, reference kinship terms, items closely associated to the possessor and parts of wholes. Indirect possession is expressed by two distinct subtypes: the free and construct indirect constructions. The free indirect construction has pronominal possessors only, encoded by two distinct pronoun paradigms: general and part-whole possession pronouns. The former pronouns are used for possession of items that normally do not occur in the direct construction, and the latter are used for possession of parts of wholes. The construct indirect construction is characterised by the occurrence of either of two construct suffixes, -n or -g. The -n construct indirect construction has pronominal and nominal possessors, and the same semantic scope as the direct construction. The -g construct indirect construction has nominal possessors only, and the same semantic scope as the free indirect construction with general possession pronouns. This study also demonstrates that free variation between two possessive constructions, the direct construction and the -n construct indirect construction with pronominal possessors, occur in the language, although more work is needed to determine the scope of this feature. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Abstract ii List of tables and figures vi Abbreviations vii Map ix Pictures x 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1. Lelepa: Historical and ethnographic review 2 1.1.1 Early settlement and material culture 2 1.1.2 Pottery and early history 3 1.1.3 Social organisation and later history 4 1.1.4 European contact 7 1.1.5 Lelepa today 9 1.2. Methodology and corpus 10 1.2.1 Field methodology 11 1.2.2 The corpus 12 1.3. Lelepa: the language 13 1.3.1 Elements of phonology 13 1.3.2 Nominals and the noun phrase 15 1.3.3 Verbs and the verb phrase 20 1.4. Overview of the study 24 2. A CROSS-LINGUISTIC APPROACH TO THE CATEGORY OF POSSESSION 26 2.1. Possession and possessive relationships 26 2.1.1 Possessive relationships 26 iii 2.1.2 Heads and modifiers in a possessive construction 28 2.2. Alienability vs. inalienability 29 2.2.1 A broad definition of the alienability vs. inalienability opposition 30 2.2.2 Is inalienability a formal or a semantic category? 30 2.3. The realisation of the inalienability vs. alienability opposition across languages 32 2.3.1 A semantic opposition 32 2.3.2 A semantic and formal opposition 35 3. POSSESSION IN OCEANIC LANGUAGES 38 3.1. The Oceanic languages: an overview 38 3.1.1 Genetic affiliation 38 3.1.2 Internal subgrouping 39 3.1.3 Typological features 41 3.2. Possession in Oceanic languages: previous research 43 3.2.1 Introduction 44 3.2.2 Previous works on Oceanic possession 46 3.3. Different possessive systems 67 3.3.1 Inalienability and alienability 67 3.3.2 Systems with direct and indirect possessive constructions 68 3.3.3 Other systems 74 4. OVERVIEW OF LELEPA POSSESSION 75 4.1. Direct possession 75 4.2. Indirect possession 76 5. DIRECT POSSESSION 80 5.1. Form of the direct construction 80 5.1.1 Structure and paradigm 80 5.1.2 Number marking 81 5.1.2 Morphophonology 82 5.2. Directly possessed nouns 83 5.3. Semantic scope of the direct construction 86 5.3.1 Body parts 87 iv 5.3.2 Body products 88 5.3.3 Kinship terms 89 5.3.4 Personal attributes 91 5.3.5 Representations of the possessor 91 6. INDIRECT POSSESSION 92 6.1. Form of the free indirect construction 92 6.1.1 Structure and paradigms 92 6.1.2 Number marking 94 6.1.3 Word order reversal 94 6.2. Semantic scope of the free indirect construction 95 6.2.1 General possession 95 6.2.2 Part-whole possession 100 6.3. Form of the construct indirect possession 102 6.3.1 Structure 102 6.3.2 Morphophonology 103 6.4. Semantic scope of the construct indirect construction 104 6.4.1 -n construct indirect construction 104 6.4.2 -g construct indirect construction 110 6.5. A case of possessive constructions in free variation? 112 6.5.1 The problem 112 6.5.2 Languages encoding possessors with independent pronouns 114 6.5.3 Conclusion 115 6.6. Variation of possessive relationships 116 APPENDIX - Table of texts 120 BIBLIOGRAPHY 123 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Tables Table 1:1. Lelepa phonemes 13 Table 1:2. Lelepa stress patterns 14 Table 1:3. Consonant clusters 15 Table 1:4. Independent pronouns 16 Table 1:5. Bound subject pronouns 16 Table 1:6. Bound object pronouns 18 Table 1:7. Nominalised verbs 20 Table 1:8. Structure of the verb 20 Table 1:9. Verb stems undergoing initial consonant alternation 22 Table 4:1. Direct and indirect possessive constructions types 79 Table 5:1. Bound possessive pronouns 80 Table 5:2. Surface forms of nouns directly possessed with the suffix -na 82 Table 5:3. Directly possessed nouns 85 Table 5:4. Correspondences between address and reference kin terms 89 Table 6:1. General possession pronouns 93 Table 6:2. Part-whole possession pronouns 93 Table 6:3. Vowel insertion in nouns taking the inalienability construct suffix 104 Maps Map of Efate and the Shepherds ix Photographs Picture 1. George Munalpa x Picture 2. TomsenNaman x Picture 3. Billy Poikiiki xi Picture 4. Working on texts xi Picture 5. Listening to field recordings xii VI ABBREVIATIONS The glossing of the examples appearing in this work follows the Leipzig Glossing Rules. However, some additions and adaptations were made to fit Lelepa. affix boundary = clitic boundary reduplication boundary separates meaning in a gloss : separates meanings in a portmanteau morpheme 1 first person 2 second person 3 third person ACC accusative AL alienable ART article BEN benefactive CLF classifier COMP complementiser COP copula CS construct suffix DAT dative DP direct possessive DU dual DUR durative EXCL exclusive F feminine GENPOSS general possessive Vll HAB habitual HESIT hesitation IN inalienable INCL inclusive INT intensifier IRR irrealis LIG ligature (for numerals) NEG negation particle NEG2 second negation particle NMLZ nominalisation prefix NMLZ2 nominalisation suffix NSG non singular OBJ direct object OBL oblique object PARTPOSS part-whole possessive POSS possessive PL plural p.name proper name (including place names) PRF perfect PROG progressive PRS present PRT preterite R realis REL relativiser REP repetitive RES resultative RF realis future SG singular TR transitivizer V epenthetic vowel Vlll oTongoa 0 £2> Tongaiikl Bunlnga Emae O Makira 0, Mataso V/Emau °Kakula Map. Efate and the Shepherds Islands [outline taken from Lynch and Crowley (2001:108)] IX Picture 1. Georges Munalpa. His texts are indexed 'GM'. (2008) (all photos by the author except as otherwise stated) V Picture 2. Tomsen Naman. His texts are indexed 'TN'. (2008) Picture.3 Billy Poikiiki outside his tipa 'traditional house'. His texts are indexed 'BP'. (2008) Picture 4. Clockwise from top left: Tomsen Naman, the author, Rex Kaltok and Sualo Kalsog working on texts. Sualo's texts are indexed 'SUK'. Photo by Douglas Meto. (2008) XI Picture 5. From left to right: Billy Tugulmaanu, Tomsen Naman and Rex Kaltok listening to field recordings. Billy's texts are indexed 'BT'. (2008) xii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION This thesis describes possessive constructions in Lelepa, an Oceanic language of central Vanuatu. It is the first description of any aspect of this language, which is spoken on the island of Lelepa and in the village of Mangaliliu (see map) on facing Efate Island by about seven hundred people. Several other Efate vernaculars1 are spoken on Efate, such as Nakanamanga2 and South Efate3, and all Efate languages are closely related, with different speech communities scattered around the island, creating a dialect-chain situation (Lynch and Crowley 2001:108). The present chapter gives background information on Lelepa and on the present study. The first section deals with the history of Lelepa, using archaeological, historical and anthropological information. It focuses on early settlement, material culture, traditional social organisation and early European contact. It also briefly discusses the present Lelepa community in its social context. The second section discusses the methodology and field methods used to conduct this study.