A Grammar of Papapana, with an investigation into Language Contact and Endangerment Ellen Louise Smith B.A.(Hons), M.A. A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Linguistics School of Humanities and Social Science Faculty of Education and Arts The University of Newcastle, Australia February 2015 Statement of Originality The thesis contains no material which has been accepted 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 in the text. 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. Signed: ______________________________ Date: _______________________________ i Acknowledgements This PhD has been a fascinating, exciting and sometimes daunting experience that has taken me across the world to two different countries where I have gained and developed an enormous range of life, linguistic and academic skills and knowledge. I feel very privileged to have been given this rewarding opportunity and I would like to thank the numerous people without whom it would not have been possible to complete this PhD. Firstly I must acknowledge that this thesis is part of and dependent on the outcomes of a project funded by a Major Documentation Project grant (MDP0206) from the Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, England. I would like to thank ELDP for funding this project and my principal supervisor Bill Palmer for securing this funding; without it this project would never have been possible. This project would of course not have been possible without the cooperation of the Papapana speech community. I am indebted to them for welcoming me into their community and collaborating with me on the documentation and description of their language. I am especially grateful to John Konnou for introducing me to and helping me get set up in the Papapana community. I would like to thank Helen Kiara for looking after me as I found my feet and for being instrumental in recruiting participants in the first few months. My warmest thanks go to Casilda Vavetaovi-Atuvia and Jerry Atuvia for their wonderful friendship and generous hospitality. Thank you Casi for always being on hand to answer questions about Papapana and Jerry for fixing the generator on countless occasions. Thank you to everyone who told me stories and taught me the names and use/history of various items and activities. Thank you to those people who good-naturedly answered my many questions in elicitation sessions and patiently assisted me with transcription and translation. Thank you to Bill Palmer and Catriona Malau for being fantastic supervisors. I am extremely grateful to you both for your enthusiasm, for always having your doors open and being so approachable, and for being so very generous of your time. I have thoroughly enjoyed having you as supervisors and I owe you an enormous amount of credit for all that I have learnt and achieved over the past few years. Thank you for your detailed feedback, for your patience and for all your advice and help not just with my thesis but with other areas of my academic development. Thank you to Åshild Næss and Mark Harvey who also acted as my supervisors at various points during my PhD and gave me feedback on chapters, encouragement and shared their expertise. All remaining mistakes are of course my own. Thank you to Beth Evans, Birgit Hellwig, Piet Lincoln, Anna Margetts and Malcolm Ross, who have generously given of their time at various points over the past few years to share their expertise with me. Thank you to Kim Blewett at SIL in Buka for helping me with Toolbox issues while in the field and to SIL in Papua New Guinea for the literacy material templates. ii Thank you to Yaron Matras, my B.A. (Hons) dissertation supervisor, for inspiring my interest in language contact, for all his advice over the years, and for being instrumental in me making the decision to keep travelling east when I had begun thinking about heading back west. Thank you to all the New Zealander volunteers and police in Arawa and Buka for their friendship and company whenever I was in town. Village life can be quite claustrophobic and isolating at times and you all helped me stay sane. Thank you especially to Norah and Lindsay Riddick, and Rosie and Dave Hall for their warm hospitality and for treating me like a surrogate daughter, even to the extent of letting me use their washing machines. Thank you to Lindsay for sharing his research on Bougainville missions and most of all for discovering and sending me the 1930s photographs of Teperoi. Thank you to other members of the Linguistics department at the University of Newcastle for your friendship and for sharing my love of linguistics. Thank you Simón González for your help with Praat and thank you especially to Stephen Logan – I couldn’t have asked for a better project colleague. You’ve been a great support and a great friend. Thank you to all my family and friends for always being there for me no matter where I am. Thank you for encouraging me to apply for this PhD “just for practice” and then when I got it, thank you for believing in me, supporting me and giving me the encouragement I needed to take the plunge. Thank you to those friends who are already/nearly doctors themselves for their inspiration, motivation and most of all their understanding. Thank you to the Dennis family for their love and support, and for being my home away from home. It’s been very hard to be so far from my family in England for so long but it has made a big difference to have family time in Australia. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my immediate family, especially my parents Sharon and George, for their continual love, advice and encouragement, even though it has meant that for the best part of six years I have been in other countries, continents or hemispheres, often in places with volcanoes, earthquakes or other things which would rattle the nerves of any parent. I know it has been very hard at times for all of them that I have been so far away but they have never failed to support me. Last but by no means least, I couldn’t have got through the last few years without my fiancé Jeff. He has put up with long hours, stress, homesickness and many months of a long-distance relationship. I am hugely grateful to him for being so independent in Bougainville and completely embracing village life – it not only allowed me to get on with my work, but also gave me a boost in enthusiasm. Thank you for your love and support, for being loyal and for encouraging my adventures, but most of all, when I needed a break, thank you for making me laugh and for not being a linguist. Mata:na iii Table of Contents Statement of Originality i Acknowledgments ii Table of Contents iv List of Tables xi List of Figures xiii List of Maps xiv Abbreviations xv Glossing conventions xvi Abstract xvii Part I Context 1 1. Introduction 2 1.1 Aims 2 1.2 Fieldwork and methodology 2 1.2.1 Access and approval 3 1.2.2 Field sites 3 1.2.3 Project management 5 1.2.4 Participant recruitment, payment and consent 6 1.2.5 Data collection 8 1.2.5.1 Lexical and grammatical elicitation recordings 8 1.2.5.2 Text recordings 9 1.2.5.3 Other linguistic data: participant observation, elicitation, community materials 10 1.2.5.4 Photographs 11 1.2.5.5 Sociolinguistic and genealogical data: informal interviews, genealogical profiles and participant observation 12 1.2.6 Data processing 13 1.2.6.1 Elicitation and text recordings 14 1.2.6.1.1 Secure storage 14 1.2.6.1.2 Transcription and translation 14 1.2.6.1.3 Metadata 15 1.2.6.2 Photographs 16 1.2.6.3 Sociolinguistic, genealogical and other linguistic data 16 1.2.7 Data analysis, presentation and access 17 1.3 Thesis organisation 18 2 Language Background 19 2.1 The name and location of the Papapana language 19 2.2 Papapana speakers 21 2.3 Genetic affiliation 24 2.4 Previous research and documentation 28 2.5 Typological overview 29 2.5.1 Phonology 29 2.5.2 Nouns and Noun Phrases 30 2.5.3 Verbs and the Verb Complex 31 2.5.4 Clause Types and Structures 32 2.5.5 Complex Sentences 33 Part II A Grammar of Papapana 35 3 Phonology 36 3.1 Segmental phonology 36 3.1.1 Vowels 36 3.1.1.1 Monophthongs 36 3.1.1.2 Vowel length 37 3.1.1.3 Diphthongs and vowel sequences 39 3.1.2 Consonants 42 iv 3.1.2.1 Consonant phonemes 42 3.1.2.2 Consonant phones 44 3.1.2.2.1 Allophonic variation 45 3.1.2.2.2 Glide creation 45 3.1.2.2.3 Glottal epenthesis 46 3.1.3 Phonological variation and change 47 3.2 Orthography 47 3.2.1 Orthographic representation of vowels 47 3.2.2 Orthographic representation of consonants 48 3.3 Phonotactics 49 3.3.1 Syllable structure 49 3.3.2 Word shape 50 3.4 Reduplication 51 3.4.1 Monosyllabic copying 51 3.4.2 Disyllabic copying 53 3.4.3 Simultaneous double monosyllabic copying 54 3.4.4 Simultaneous monosyllabic and disyllabic copying 54 3.5 Stress 54 3.5.1 Regular stress assignment 54 3.5.2 Reduplication and stress 56 3.5.3 Proclitics and stress 57 3.5.4 Suffixes, enclitics and stress 58 4 Nouns and Noun Phrases 60 4.1 Nouns and noun phrase structure 60 4.2 Pronouns 62 4.2.1 Independent pronouns 62 4.3 Noun class 63 4.3.1 Personal nouns 65 4.3.2 Class I nouns 66 4.3.3 Class