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A Grammar of Eibela: a Language of the Western Province, Papua New Guinea

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A Grammar of Eibela: a Language of the Western Province, Papua New Guinea ResearchOnline@JCU This file is part of the following reference: Aiton, Grant William (2016) A grammar of Eibela: a language of the Western Province, Papua New Guinea. PhD thesis, James Cook University. Access to this file is available from: http://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/49404/ The author has certified to JCU that they have made a reasonable effort to gain permission and acknowledge the owner of any third party copyright material included in this document. If you believe that this is not the case, please contact [email protected] and quote http://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/49404/ A Grammar of Eibela: A language of Western Province, Papua New Guinea By Grant William Aiton, MSc A thesis submitted to James Cook University, Cairns in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December, 2016 College of Arts, Society and Education – James Cook University Acknowledgements The research that lead to this dissertation was possible thanks to the funding provided by the ARC grant “The Grammar of Knowledge” granted to Distinguished Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald, a grant from the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research for the documentation of oral literature, and a grant from the Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP). I would like to especially thank the ELDP, particularly the director Mandana Seyfeddinipur, for training and assistance in conducting research in the field. Support funding was also provided by the Graduate Research School of James Cook University for conference travel and fieldwork expenses. This dissertation is the result of many months of patient instruction and teaching by members of the Eibela community, and would not have been possible without their assistance and hospitality. I would like to especially thank Stalone Sapai, Josben Dosobi, Sapai Ugei, Dono Wemaye, Nicks Yakemiya, Dogudopu Dagiye, Sada Howasa, Jake Sada, Howabi Foli, Towa Howabi, John Howabi, Wese Kepediya, Dikino Sagoi, and Ediyobu Hamaya. I would also like to thank my fellow linguists in Cairns for their valuable insights and company during the writing process, particularly Hannah, Juliane, Valérie, Angeliki, Kasia, Elena, and Nick. I am of course indebted to my supervisors, Alexandra Aikhenvald, Robert Dixon, and Michael Wood for their guidance and direction throughout my research. I also found dear friends in Ana, Claudia, Julio, Janet, Nandini, Dagmar, Peci, Hanshe, Bård, Alisa, and Christiane, who made Cairns a home. Finally, I thank my mother for her love and devotion, and Sylvia for her support and patience. Statement of Authorship I declare that this thesis is my own work, and has not been submitted in any form for any other diploma or certificate at any other university or institution. Information derived from the published or unpublished work or any other author or my own published work has been acknowledged in the text, and a list of references has been provided. As the copyright owner, I grant James Cook University a permanent non-exclusive license to store, display or copy this thesis or any portion thereof, in all forms and media. Copies may be used within the university, and made freely available online to other persons or organizations. I do not wish to place any restrictions on this work. The research presented in this thesis was completed in accordance with the guidelines of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, 2007. The research study proposal received human research ethics approval from the James Cook University Human Research Ethics Committee, Approval Number H4863. Grant Aiton iii Abstract This thesis is a reference grammar of the Eibela language, also referred to as Aimele (Ethnologue code: AIL). Eibela has approximately 300 speakers living primarily in Lake Campbell, Western Province, Papua New Guinea. The majority of the data for this thesis was gathered in Lake Campbell, with some addition research taking place in Wawoi Falls, Western Province. In Lake Campbell, Eibela is the dominant language of the community, and is the language of day- to-day life. English and Tok Pisin are becoming more prominent as languages of commerce, and are preferred for written communication. Most members of the Lake Campbell community are also adept at speaking the languages of the surrounding communities. The primary goal of this linguistic work is to describe the salient aspects of Eibela grammar, and to contribute to ongoing research in the Mount Bosavi region. This reference grammar describes the phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse structure of Eibela, as well as providing example texts in the appendix. This grammar is also meant to facilitate the production of additional materials both for the linguistics community and for the Eibela community. In the course of describing the language, many stories and narrations have been recorded, transcribed, and annotated. From these texts, a digital corpus of Eibela has been compiled, which consists of a digitized collection of recordings as well as the accompanying transcriptions and metadata. This corpus is available in Aiton (2016). The primary method of data collection was the collection and transcription of spoken narratives. This language data was then analyzed with the help of on-site consultants who are native Eibela speakers. Once my own understanding of the language was sufficiently advanced, I was able to observe speakers in order to analyze how the language in used in day-to-day activities, and therefore benefit from participant observation to develop an accurate representation of how the language is used. The narratives recorded were collected from a wide variety of genres such as traditional stories, explanations of common activities, and personal histories. This was to ensure that different styles of speech are represented in the description of the language. iv The canonical constituent order in Eibela is SV in intransitive clauses and AOV in transitive clauses, where S is the subject of an intransitive clause, A is the subject of a transitive clause, and O is the direct object of a clause. Other constituent orders are possible, and are largely conditioned by information structure. Constituents that are prominent or topical are often omitted from clauses completely. Morphology is exclusively suffixing, with complex verbal morphology for tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality, and optional ergative-absolutive case-marking on noun phrases in core argument positions. Word classes include open classes of nouns, verbs, and adverbs, and several closed classes including adjectives, demonstratives, postpositions, verbal particles, quantifiers, and others. Intransitive predicates in Eibela can be formed by lexical roots of nearly any word class, although only verbs may be inflected by the full range of tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality suffixes. Complex inflectional classes of verbs result in various patterns of stem alternations and suppletive tense forms, as well as complex predicates consisting of multiple verbal roots forming a single predicate. These complex predicates may take the form of serial verb constructions, auxiliary constructions, or converbal constructions. In these constructions, only the final verbal root is inflected for predicate categories such as tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality. Eibela clauses may be linked together into clause chains, which include several medial clauses culminating in a fully inflected final clause. In medial clauses, the different-subject- marking suffix {-biː} may be used to show that the subject of the medial clause differs from the subject of the main clause, or that the subject of a main clause differs from the topic of the discourse episode. Clauses and noun phrases may additionally be morphologically topicalized, in which case, different-subject-marking functions in much the same way, with the verb in the topic clause being suffixed by {-biː} if its subject differs from that of the main clause predicate. Other interesting features of Eibela include topicalization, evidentials, complex verbal suppletion, and semi-suppletive case forms for nouns and demonstratives. Topics may be formed morphosyntactically from arguments or clauses. Evidentials are a semantically defined class of constructions which includes three different morphosyntactic categories, and covers v four different evidential categories corresponding to a C3 type system as described by Aikhenvald (2006a). Verb stems may have several variant forms, which in some cases is completely suppletive, and verbal tense, aspect, and modality has many instances of structural overlap. Nouns may also inflect irregularly based on noun class distinctions and case is also irregularly expressed on demonstratives. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..........................................................................................................................ii Statement of Authorship ................................................................................................................ iii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... iv Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................ xvi Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 Overview .........................................................................................................................
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