A Grammar of the Manihiki Language Aslak Vaag Olesen BA (Aarhus), MA (Copenhagen) A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Linguistics School of Humanities and Social Science Faculty of Education and Arts University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia July 2020 I hereby certify that the work embodied in the thesis is my own work, conducted under normal supervision. The thesis contains no material which has been accepted, or is being examined, for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 and any approved embargo. Signature: Date: i Dedications To Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, For igniting my life-long interest in Polynesia through his writings. To Professor William Wilson of the University of Hawai‘i, For suggesting to me to make the language of Manihiki and Rakahanga the object of this present work. To all the people of Manihiki and Rakahanga, For generously sharing their time and their knowledge with me, and for inviting me into their homes and treating me like an old friend. And to my partner, Gabrielle McGinnis, For being a constant support for me through all the ups and downs that I have encountered during my travels in the Pacific and during the writing of this thesis. ii Acknowledgements A grammar like this is never the work of one person only. Numerous people have helped make it into what it is today. The idea to make the language of the two tiny atolls of Manihiki and Rakahanga the object of this present study, was first given to me by Prof William Wilson of the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo in January 2015. I had spent the preceding 6 months putting together a project to study the Asumbuo language, spoken on the island of Utupua in Temotu Province, the easternmost province of the Solomon Islands. However, it was looking more and more unlikely that I would be granted a visa to stay for a longer period of time in the Solomon Islands. Realizing that I might have to abandon this project, at least for the foreseeable future, I began looking around for another language that seemed to make a suitable object of study. I began writing to linguists at various universities whose works I had read, and as I had been fascinated with Polynesia since childhood, I decided to write to Prof Wilson as well. I had at that point in time never expected that there would be a language within Triangle Polynesia that had never been the object of a study before, but alas, there was! Prof Wilson wrote back to me the very next day with a list of suitable Polynesian languages. A lot of these belonged to the so-called Polynesian Outliers, but one in language, spoken on the two atolls of Manihiki and Rakahanga, was situated virtually right at the centre of Triangle Polynesia and belonged to the Eastern Polynesian branch, the one that interested me the most. It would be difficult in a limited space to mention all the people who have since helped me make the present study a reality. However, I would like to mention my supervisors, Dr Åshild Næss, Dr Catriona Malau and Prof Bill Palmer of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. My first principal supervisor, Åshild, helped me transition from my previous project in the Solomon Islands to the newer one in the Cook Islands. Since Åshild left Newcastle, Catriona has kindly read and re-read the chapters of this thesis pointing out inconsistencies and areas where further description and discussion was necessary. Bill has provided invaluable feedback on various chapters. The Phonology chapter in particular has benefitted from Bill’s expertise in prosody. Its current analyses are in large part due to him. Thanks also iii to everyone who presented at our Tuesday afternoon seminars at the Senta Taft-Hendry Museum, and participated in the following discussions. Of all the other people that have helped me throughout the way, I would like to especially thank Dr Ross Clark and Sally Nicholas of the University of Auckland. Both welcomed me warmly during my one-month stay in Auckland in September 2015 and provided me with invaluable advice and recommendations. Dr Clark also provided me with a 24-page unpublished Manihiki vocabulary that he had compiled with the help native speakers that had studied with him throughout the years. Last, but not least, I would like to acknowledge all of the people of Manihiki who have patiently endured my questions and queries and have welcomed me into their homes. iv Abstract This thesis describes the grammar of the language spoken on the two small atolls of Manihiki and Rakahanga in the Northern Group of the Cook Islands. The language is a Polynesian language belonging to the Eastern Polynesian subgroup and is closely related to neighbouring languages such as Tongarevan and Rarotongan. The work is the first ever reasonably thorough description of this language, and is based on a number of video recordings, collected during a total of approximately 12 months of fieldwork. The fieldwork was split into several different visits to New Zealand, as well as to Rarotonga and Manihiki in the Cook Islands. The recordings were transcribed and translated with the help of native speakers. The grammar is divided into seven chapters: Preliminaries, Phonology, Word Classes, The Noun Phrase, The Verb Complex, Clause Structure and Complex Sentences. From the description, one can see that the Manihiki language is a fairly typical Eastern Polynesian language. It is grammatically very close to Rarotongan and Tahitian, whereas the phonology is virtually identical to that of New Zealand Māori, with exactly the same phoneme inventory. When it comes to word classes, Manihiki exhibits a fluidity between nouns and verbs which is typical of Polynesian languages, and which is probably facilitated by the fact that Manihiki is an almost entirely analytic language, with no inflectional morphology and only three derivational affixes: two causative prefixes and a nominalizing suffix. Manihiki also appears to be a fairly typical Polynesian language when it comes to the use of determiners with noun phrases and preverbal particles with verb complexes. It also contains the presentative preposition ko, cognate forms of which are found in most other Polynesian languages. Further research will be needed in order to determine the exact position of Manihiki within the Eastern Polynesian subgroup. v Table of Contents Dedications .............................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................ iii Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................... vi Tables ................................................................................................................................................... xiv Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................................ xv Glosses .................................................................................................................................................. xvi 1. Preliminaries ................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Geography of the Cook Islands ..................................................................................................... 3 1.2.1 The languages of the Northern Group .......................................................................... 4 1.2.2 The languages of the Southern Group .......................................................................... 5 1.2.3 The sociolinguistic situation .......................................................................................... 6 1.3 The Polynesian Languages and Their Position Within Oceanic .................................................... 7 1.3.1 The internal subdivision of the Polynesian group ......................................................... 8 1.3.2 Previous works on the languages of Polynesia ........................................................... 10 1.3.3. The position of Manihiki within EPN ........................................................................... 13 1.3.3.1 Elbert’s subgrouping of the EPN languages .............................................................. 14 1.3.3.2 Internal subdivisions of EPN – on the existence of the Marquesic/Tahitic split ...... 16 1.3.4. The other languages in the EPN subgroup .................................................................. 17 1.4 Previous Works on the Languages of The Cook Islands and Related Languages ....................... 19 1.5