Language & Linguistics in Melanesia Special Issue 2012 Part I ISSN: 0023-1959 Journal of the Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea ISSN: 0023-1959 Special Issue 2012 Harald Hammarström & Wilco van den Heuvel (eds.) History, contact and classification of Papuan languages Part One Language & Linguistics in Melanesia Special Issue 2012 Part I ISSN: 0023-1959 VERBS WITH PRONOMINAL OBJECT PREFIXES IN FINISTERRE-HUON LANGUAGES Edgar Suter University of Cologne
[email protected] ABSTRACT The Finisterre-Huon stock was established by Kenneth McElhanon (1975). His evidence for a genealogical relationship among these 60 plus languages is reviewed and found to be compelling. In this article I take up one of his pieces of evidence, verbs with pronominal object prefixes, and elaborate on it. The Finisterre-Huon languages have a small closed class of transitive verbs taking pronominal object prefixes. A few of these verbs are cognate across both putative first-order subgroups, the Huon Peninsula family and the Finisterre-Saruwaged family, and can be reconstructed for proto Finisterre-Huon. Most of the pronominal object prefixes can also be reconstructed and are found to be identical to the free pronouns proposed for proto Trans New Guinea by Stephen Wurm (1975) and Malcolm Ross (2005), to which I suggest adding *ya 'they'. Three of the prefixed verbs reconstructed for proto Finisterre-Huon have cognates in other Trans New Guinea subfamilies giving rise to higher level reconstructions. KEYWORDS: Finisterre-Huon, Trans New Guinea, reconstruction, verb morphology, personal pronouns, object verbs INTRODUCTION The Finisterre-Huon languages are spoken in the northern half of Morobe Province and the adjacent part of Madang Province in Papua New Guinea.1 They cover the whole Huon Peninsula, except for the coastal fringes where Oceanic languages are spoken, run along the Saruwaged mountains and end in the Finisterre Range, which straddles the border between 1 The research for this paper was commissioned by the Department of Linguistics of the University of Cologne, Germany.