The language of Paama (New Hebrides)
Creators: name: Crowley, Terry
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 1979
Subjects: subject: Paama language

description: The present work is a description of the language spoken on the island of Paama in the New Hebrides, a language which is otherwise undescribed except for a short grammatical sketch that was published in the early 1900's on the basis of a missionary's translation of the Bible. The language, referred to throughout as "Paamese" in the absence of any particular indigenous name, is an Austronesian language of the Oceanic branch. It is a language with much greater morphological complexity than other Oceanic languages such as Fijian and the Polynesian languages, though it is considerably simpler than other Oceanic languages of the southern New Hebrides and New Caledonia. Chapter I has been written to provide the reader with the linguistic, socio-cultural and geographic background necessary for an appreciation of the remainder of the work. Chapter II describes the phonological system of the language. This is a rather complex system in that there is a basic set of oppositions, which differs quite markedly from the surface set of oppositions in both nature and distribution. This somewhat abstract treatment of the phonology is necessary to account for the various kinds of surface alternations in the language, and to enable a simpler general statement of the phonological system to be made. Mediating between the underlying and surface levels, there is a set of complex ordered and unordered phonological rules. Chapter III presents the various form classes, along with the distinguishing morpho-syntactic characteristics and semantic content of each. Chapter IV describes the structure of the nominal phrase. It is shown that nominal phrases can be viewed as either simple (containing only a single head) or complex (containing two heads). In a complex nominal phrase, the two nominal phrase heads are related in a number of different ways semantically and grammatically. In this chapter, the nature and behaviour of nominal phrase adjuncts is also described. Chapter V describes the structure of the verb phrase. One of the most characteristic features of Paamese verbs is the alternation in the form of the initial segments of verb roots according to the nature of the syntactic environment the forms occur in, a characteristic incidentally that Paamese shares with a number of other New Hebridean languages. The inflectional and derivational morphology of Paamese verbs is also described. It is shown that there is some morphological reanalysis taking place in the language, making for difficulties in giving a purely synchronic analysis. Finally, this chapter describes the behaviour of verb phrase adjuncts, especially those verb phrases in which a verbal head is followed by one or more verbal adjuncts. Chapter VI provides a description of the clause level grammar of the language. The various syntactic relationships which hold between various kinds of phrase level constituents are described, along with the semantic correlates of these constructions. This includes a description of prepositional constructions and the complex possessivetype constructions. Also included in this chapter is a description of interrogative clauses and interjections. This description does not go beyond the clause level. There is, therefore, no attempt to deal with inter-clausal relations, nor is there any attempt at discourse analysis. This decision has been made so that the account of the lower levels of analysis could be presented in as much detail as possible. Detailed descriptions of the grammars of insular Melanesian languages are particularly lacking, and it is hoped that this thesis will help fill the gap. This is not to say, however, that I regard the higher levels of analysis as of lesser significance. Quite the contrary. Rather than give a sketchy account at this stage, I would prefer to leave it as a research priority for the future. Another priority is to publish, for the people of Paama, as many of the stories (traditional and modern) that I recorded on tape in Paamese. There is a strong likelihood that a sizeable volume of Paamese texts will appear in 1980. Attached as an appendix are the numbers 1-60 in Paamese, a short basic lexicon with English glosses and some illustrative text material with English translations.