Dynamics of change in person-number indexes in insular Western Oceanic
Creators: name: Dalle Ceste, Carlo
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2024

description: The aim of this thesis is to investigate the pathways and mechanisms of morphosyntactic change through a series of case studies on the person-number indexes in the languages of the Western Oceanic linkage. This thesis aims to identify the dynamics underpinning those pathways and mechanisms, that is, the processes of changes that have conspired to create the current situation in the present-day languages from the picture reconstructed in their remote ancestor: Proto Oceanic. This topic has a broad relevance for contemporary historical linguistics, in that it aims to shed light on the way pronominal paradigms are created and maintained. To do this, I zero in on Western Oceanic, that is, is a grouping of Oceanic languages spoken in western Melanesia. Diachronic analysis of pronominal forms in Western Oceanic languages, particularly those spoken in the insular region encompassing New Britain, New Ireland, and the Northwest Solomons, seems to witness a layered history of loss and renewal, which may help us better understand the dynamics of paradigm reformation. In this thesis, the forms of the free pronouns and the pronominal markers known as "subject(-indexing) markers" are examined. As for the latter, I identify instability as a general characteristic of insular Western Oceanic subject markers. This seems to be a recurrent phenomenon in the history of these languages, resulting in the cyclic reformation of formatives and reorganization of subject realization systems. In more concrete terms, two major tendencies are identified: 1) the incorporation of erstwhile TAM-marking particles into subject markers, resulting in multiple sets of hardly segmentable TAM-marked forms; and 2) coalescence with free pronouns, resulting in functional ambiguity. Despite being subject to loss and renewal, subject-indexing markers-as a grammatical category-tend to be retained. Like subject markers, free pronouns point to functional instability, hence, a propensity for turnover. In several languages, they reflect layered reformation making use of formatives of pronominal and non pronominal origin. In some languages, free pronouns show etymologically bound pronominal morphology. The most dramatic case is found in South New Ireland, where the non-singular forms of the free pronouns reflect the promotion of possessive suffixes as freestanding markers, thus, pointing to an atypical-and controversial-type of change known as "debonding". Among the historically non-pronominal formatives reflected by insular Western Oceanic free pronouns, we find numerals. The latter go back to a crosslinguistically-unique tendency to display rich systems of number distinctions. Besides singular and plural, many languages also show dual, trial, and quadral number-marked pronouns, where the numerals are concatenated to the plural pronominal forms. Unlike existing work on the topic, I take a diachronic perspective to the analysis of number-marked pronouns. These forms are likely to find their origin in productive pronominal phrases, where the numerals stood as optional appositional specifying elements. Building on this, I discuss the constructionalizing behavior reflected by the individual numerals in the various languages, drawing some general conclusions on the paths of semantic change they seem to take. The analysis of WOc person-number indexes further demonstrates that changes always occur entrenched within the context of the prior systems, and that analyses cannot be conducted in isolation. Although some individual changes may be peculiar to a given group, their underlying mechanisms are likely to be more general, and, thus, relevant to other changes taking place in languages further afield. As we shall see, the changes reflected by person-number indexes in WOc languages, despite resulting in very different outcomes, tell of a parallel history of recurrent loss and renewal of the original formatives.