1 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Solomon Islands Solomon Islands Pidgin is a variety of Melanesian Pidgin currently estimated to be spoken by at least 420,000 people in the Solomon Islands, a nation whose population is about 500,000. Locally the language is known as Pijin and so I usually refer to it by this name throughout. The nation of Solomon Islands lies to the North-East of Australia. The capital, Honiara, is located at approximately longitude 160 degrees east and latitude 9 degrees south. Solomon Islands as a nation is a former British Protectorate that became independent in 1978. The indigenous population is mainly Melanesian with a few small Polynesian groups. Linguistically the nation is a complex mix of at least sixty Austronesian languages and half a dozen non-Austronesian (or Papuan) languages (Gordon 2005). I say ‘at least’ because that is the number reported by the Ethnologue, however, as an advisor to the 1999 Solomon Islands census I identified 123 language/dialect names. Eventually 93 language names were established for the census data collection. The languages so identified would not all be recognized as distinct languages by many linguists even though the speakers of these languages/dialects have some conception of their identity as varieties of languages. We can conclude that the Solomon Islands is a nation where language contact is inevitable and complex. Map Source: http://www.intute.ac.uk/sciences/worldguide/html/1020_map.html#map2 2 1.2 Previous Studies of Pijin Some time ago, Jourdan (1985b, p.1) noted in her sociolinguistic dissertation on Pijin that as far as scholars of Pacific Pidgins were concerned, hardly anything was known about Solomon Islands Pidgin. Of the works written in the fifteen years before her thesis Jourdan does refer to Simons and Young’s Pijin blong Yumi: A Guide to Solomon Islands Pijin (Simons & Young 1978) and also to one of the Peace Corps language learning books on Pijin (Huebner & Horoi 1979b) but not the others they produced (Huebner 1979; Huebner & Horoi 1979a). She does not acknowledge the existence of a brief study done by Leah Waneatona (1981) or of Francis Bugotu’s minor Masters’ thesis on Pijin (Bugotu 1972). Nevertheless, it is true that in comparison to the other varieties of Melanesian Pidgin such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Bislama in Vanuatu, little had been written at that time about Pijin. Significant works on Tok Pisin by then were (Hall 1943; Murphy 1966; Mihalic 1971; Woolford 1977; Mühlhäusler 1978; Mühlhäusler 1979; Wurm & Mühlhäusler 1985; Dutton & Thomas 1985), and similarly for Bislama there was (Guy 1975; Camden 1977; Camden 1979; Charpentier 1979). Even though Pijin is briefly referred to in a wide variety of studies on Melanesian Pidgin and in general works on pidgin and creole languages, Jourdan’s comment from the mid-1980s is still true today. Since that time only a handful of articles on various aspects of Pijin grammar have been published, while only two major works concerning Pijin have been produced. Keesing’s Melanesian Pidgin and the Oceanic Substrate (Keesing 1988), is the first of these, but even then it is a more general work on the development of Melanesian Pidgin, though with significant reference to Pijin. The second is Pijin: a trilingual cultural dictionary (Jourdan 2002). This gives a great deal of detail concerning the lexicon and associated cultural information, and a brief half page of grammatical analysis. Since this is so, the purpose of this thesis is to fill the knowledge gap concerning Pijin with a detailed analysis of the grammar of Pijin with some comparison to the other varieties of Melanesian Pidgin. I also occasionally refer to some data from the vernacular languages of the Solomon Islands for additional insights or comparison. To answer the question, “What is the grammar of Solomon Islands Pidgin?” I use a structural description that does not rely on any one particular linguistic model or theory. In doing so, I hope that this description will be accessible to educated Solomon Islanders and facilitate the understanding amongst them that the study and development of Pijin is a worthwhile exercise. 3 1.3 Language Data Language data for this study comes from a variety of sources. First, there is the chance observation of language in everyday use. I have drawn a significant number of examples from such observation. Second, there is a collection of stories and conversations. These were recorded by a young Solomon Islander for me. I was not present during these recordings. As a result I am at least certain that the variety of Pijin was not adjusted to suit an expatriate by the speakers, though I recognise it cannot be completely free from observer's paradox. The resulting corpus amounts to about 10,000 words of running text. The task of adequately transcribing this spoken language data for the purpose of analysis is, as any field linguist knows, a challenging task. Llisterri (1996a) briefly outlines some of the issues involved. He notes that the types of dysfluencies in spontaneous speech increase “the difficulty of the transcription process and the complexity of the representation.” He also points out that “criteria to define utterances are not clear in spontaneous speech, neither in monologues nor in conversations.” Further to these he adds that “an adequate knowledge of the context and situation is needed for a correct understanding.” 1 To approach the transcription in a principled manner I have formulated some guidelines based on the Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (EAGLES) Preliminary recommendations on Spoken Texts ( http://www.ilc.cnr.it/EAGLES96/spokentx/spokentx.html ). Given my focus is on the grammar of Pijin and not strictly speaking on phonetics or phonological processes, I chose to use an orthographic transcription method for my spoken texts. As noted in the EAGLES policy (Llisterri 1996b), “the orthographic representation of the text corresponds to a representation of the speaker’s utterances using the standard spelling of a given language.” In view of Llisterri’s recommendations and cautions I have used the following guidelines to transcribe my recorded Pijin data: The spoken words are usually represented in accordance with the de facto standard orthographic conventions (these are phonemically based); Truncated or reduced forms of words are represented in the transcription by non-standard spelling and a lexicon of their full orthographic counterparts is maintained; Sentence boundaries are marked by a full stop and capital letter, or if a question by a question mark; 1 As an example of the need for context I had the following experience. While transcribing one of my recordings I hit a short and rapid utterance that I could not understand. Phonetically it was something like [ hAst IndЋϯ RIN]. After pondering this for some time I realised I had to do some thinking about the context. It became clear that the speaker was talking about the sponsors of an athletics competition and I concluded it must be a company name. This led to the realisation that it was a local (possibly naïve) pronunciation of the company name ‘Hastings Deering’. This company is a known sponsor of local sports events in Solomon Islands. 4 Commas are used to indicate brief pauses, longer pauses and hesitations are indicated by [pause]; Direct quoted speech is placed in quotation marks; Vocalised pauses are represented. Returning now to the sources of data, the third source is a range of published and unpublished written Pijin material. This material includes a variety of discourse genre (e.g. letters, narrative, descriptive, hortatory, and procedural) and was originally authored in Pijin by Solomon Islanders. This body of text amounts to about 10,000 words. In addition to the original works in Pijin there is also translated material amounting to some 400,000 words. A majority of this is Bible translation, but it also includes literacy books, training manuals, and most recently – articles on justice and reconciliation, and official peace agreements. I note that there are risks in relying on translated materials. Crowley critiqued Verhaar’s reference grammar of Tok Pisin on this very point saying, “it is still basically a grammar of written translated Tok Pisin rather than of the vibrant spoken language” (Crowley 1999, p.185). Verhaar (1995, p.xviii) anticipated this criticism and defended his choice of using the Bible translation with three arguments. First, the translation used was produced by translators who were “natively fluent in Tok Pisin” and they selectively chose the lect for the text. Second, the translation contains a high degree of grammatical consistency as a result of certain “assumptions about what is ‘good’ Tok Pisin”. Third, he claimed that the “biblical lect” has had a standardising influence on Tok Pisin. Though Verhaar’s arguments may be valid, there are other issues that he overlooks in relation to the use of Bible translation texts. I identify several other risks and some benefits in relation to analysing both written original works and translated biblical material. In the first place it must be acknowledged that a corpus reliant on Bible translation will have a limited scope of domains and vocabulary. Consequently, there is much day to day language and expression that never occurs in a Bible translation. Furthermore, a full range of culturally and environmentally specific events never arise in the biblical text. Second, there are certain expectations regarding acceptability that Bible translators must follow that can result in a “sanitised” text. A simple example of this is that the Pijin verb bagarap ‘ruin’ is not used by Solomon Island Bible translators for fear that those who know of its origins may be offended. Third, the translated text may have stylistic constraints due to the lack of context as compared to say live speech.