UPPSALA UNIVERSITET Masteruppsats, 30 HP Institutionen för lingvistik och filologi VT 2018 A grammar sketch of North Tanna Kristin Sverredal Supervisor: Harald Hammarström Abstract This master’s thesis is a sketch grammar of the Austronesian North Tanna language of Vanuatu. The analysis is based on translations of a North Tanna and English version of the New Testament. This work is also an evaluation and experiment of using Bible translation as a primary source for investigating the grammatical features of a language. The result is an overview of the basic areas of the grammar of North Tanna, such as over all morphology with certain focus on verbal affixation, and some general observations on syntactical features such as valency, clause linking and subordination. There is no phonological analysis since the used data is in written form. The sketch is a base which can be used for further research to either study more of the grammar of North Tanna, or to do comparative work to other languages. i Contents Abstract i Abbreviations v 1 Introduction 1 1.1 About North Tanna . 1 1.1.1 Affiliation and basics . 1 1.1.2 Typological profile . 1 1.2 Previous Work . 2 1.3 Sources for the present study . 2 1.4 Theoretical framework . 4 2 Sketch grammar of North Tanna 7 2.1 Introduction to the grammar . 7 2.2 Phonology . 8 2.3 Morphology . 9 2.3.1 Pronouns . 9 2.3.1.1 Independent pronouns . 9 2.3.1.1.1 Subject pronouns . 9 2.3.1.1.2 Object pronouns . 10 2.3.1.2 Dative pronouns . 11 2.3.2 Nouns . 12 2.3.2.1 Number . 12 2.3.2.1.1 Plural . 12 2.3.2.1.2 Dual . 14 2.3.2.2 Indefinite article kit ............................. 15 2.3.2.3 Demonstratives . 15 2.3.2.4 Possession . 17 2.3.2.4.1 Possessive suffixes . 17 2.3.2.4.2 Possessive rəha .......................... 17 2.3.3 Verbs . 19 2.3.3.1 Subject person indexing . 20 2.3.3.2 Subject number indexing . 21 2.3.3.3 TAM overview . 23 2.3.3.4 Tense . 23 2.3.3.4.1 Present/Continuous . 23 ii 2.3.3.4.2 Past . 24 2.3.3.4.3 Non-past . 24 2.3.3.5 Aspect . 25 2.3.3.5.1 Continuous . 26 2.3.3.5.2 Perfect . 26 2.3.3.5.3 Sequential . 27 2.3.3.5.4 Counterfactual . 27 2.3.3.5.5 ɨn-................................. 28 2.3.3.6 Mood . 29 2.3.3.6.1 Imperative . 29 2.3.3.7 Directionals . 29 2.3.3.8 Converb marker . 32 2.3.3.9 Negation . 33 2.3.3.10 Verbal derivational morphology . 35 2.3.4 Adjectives and modifiers . 36 2.3.4.1 Adjectives . 36 2.3.4.2 Verbal adjectives . 37 2.3.4.3 Quantifiers . 38 2.4 Syntax . 38 2.4.1 Basic word order . 38 2.4.1.1 Pro-drop . 38 2.4.2 Subordination . 39 2.4.2.1 Conditional clauses . 39 2.4.2.2 Complement clauses . 40 2.4.2.3 Equational clauses . 41 2.4.2.4 Relative clauses . 41 2.4.3 Dummy verb . 42 2.4.4 Transitivity . 42 2.4.5 Serialization . 45 2.4.6 Repetition . 46 2.4.7 Conjunctions . 47 2.4.8 Compounding . 47 2.4.8.1 Verb compounding . 48 2.4.8.2 Noun-adjective compounding . 48 2.4.9 Prepositions . 48 2.4.9.1 e ....................................... 48 2.4.9.2 əpəh ..................................... 49 iii 2.4.9.3 kəm ...................................... 49 2.4.9.4 o ....................................... 49 2.5 Numerals . 50 2.5.1 Cardinal numbers . 50 2.5.2 Ordinal numbers . 51 2.6 Interrogation . 52 2.6.1 Content questions . 52 2.6.2 Polar questions . 53 3 Summary and further work 55 References 59 iv Abbreviations 1 first person 2 second person 3 third person art article cf counterfactual comp complementizer cont continuous cvb converb dat dative dem demonstrative dir directional du dual excl exclusive fut future imp imperative incl inclusive neg negative nml nominalizer nom nominative npst non-past obj object pl plural poss possessive prep preposition prf perfect prs present pst past q question particle rel relative seq sequential sg singular sr same referent v tm transitivity marker tr transitive tri trial vi 1 Introduction This chapter consists of basic information about the North Tanna language. 1.1 presents genetic, demo- graphic and geographical information, and is followed by section 1.2, mentioning previous work on North Tanna and other Vanuatu languages. Section 1.3 introduces the sources used for this specific paper and how they were used. Finally, section 1.4 presents the theoretical approach to the grammar sketch, along with a discussion of the method of using only written sources and Bible translations as data. 1.1 About North Tanna 1.1.1 Affiliation and basics North Tanna is an Austronesian language spoken in the northern parts of Tanna Island, Vanuatu. North Tanna belongs to the Tanna family of the South Vanuatu branch. The island of Tanna belongs to the Tafea province, along with Aneityum, Futuna, Erromango and Aniwa. North Tanna’s local name is nɨnakə, which translates to ‘say what’ (Nehrbass 2012, p. 3), but since most of the sources use ‘North Tanna’ I will refer to it as such as well for convenience. There are a total of 111 languages spoken in Vanuatu, while the official languages are Bislama, English and French (Ethnologue 2018). According tothe2009 National population and Housing Census, about 63% of Vanuatuans speak a ‘local language’ privately, that is to say, a language which is not any of the three above. According to Lynch et al. (2001, p. 6) North Tanna had around 5000 speakers in 2001, which at present seems to be the most recent number. Unfortunately, the 2009 census does not give any specific information on any of the ‘local languages’, and does not provide speaker numbers. The other Tanna languages are Whitesands, Lenakel, Kwamera and Southwest Tanna (Ethnologue 2018). Lynch et al. (2001, p. 5) write that the dialectal relations of Tanna languages are complicated and that it is difficult to draw concrete boundaries between the languages and dialects. Lindstrom writes that linguistic or geographical boundaries are not the most defining social divider on Tanna (Lindstrom 1983, p. 396), which might explain why the boundaries are hard to draw. 1.1.2 Typological profile North Tanna is an agglutinative, nomino-accusative language where much of the grammatical information is marked on the verb. The verb takes affixation for subject, number, negation, direction, tense and aspect. The pronominal system shows distinctions between first person exclusive and inclusive, and between singular, dual, trial and plural. The word order is SVO, and there is no morphological marking of case, but there are some object pronouns, and three dative pronouns for singular number. There are a number of prepositions, four of which are discussed here, and an indefinite but no definite article for nouns. There are also some morphological features which are yet to be fully classified due to the scope of the work. For example there is the verbal prefix m-, possibly marking converbs, and the verbal suffix -in which is connected to transitivity. 1 Figure 1: Map of Tanna and Vanuatu (Blaymires 1995, p. 832) 1.2 Previous Work The North Tanna language is not completely undocumented, but the sources available are rather sparse, es- pecially when it comes to grammar. Lynch (2001) describes the history and genealogical relations between the Southern Vanuatu languages. Lynch et al. (2001) is a collection and summary of descriptions of all Vanuatu languages, and also Tryon (1976) has an overview and comparison of the Vanuatu languages. He focuses mostly on phonology and lexicon, and his work includes a word list of some 300 words. Another lexical source is Nehrbass (2012), which discusses the lexicon of Tanna’s five largest languages and one of its dialects. There is a short but concise chapter on North Tanna grammar by Blaymires in A grammar in Comparative Austronesian Dictionary: An Introduction to Austronesian Studies (1995). Lastly, Lindstrom (1983) discusses the boundaries between all Tanna languages, focusing more on political and social topics rather than the structure of the languages of Tanna. 1.3 Sources for the present study The main source for this grammar is the North Tanna New Testament, (NT) translated by Greg and Beth Ann Carlson. They have contributed by providing me with an unpublished ‘back-translation’ in English, which they have worked on along with several other people. This has been very helpful for many reasons, the main one being corresponding translations. The NT is itself based on several versions of the Bible, and by having only one which corresponds better to the North Tanna version, I have saved much time 2 and effort. The back translation has also proved to be very useful in cases where grammatical information has been included. For example, North Tanna shows an inclusive/exclusive distinction in pronouns and verbs, whereas English does not. In some cases the back translation conveniently includes this information such as ‘we (incl.) went’, or similar constructions. Mostly there are no notes.