A Grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako

Åshild Næss, Even Hovdhaugen

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9783110238266
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110238273
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Vaeakau-Taumako, also known as Pileni, is a Polynesian Outlier language spoken in the Reef and Duff Islands in the Solomon Islands' Temotu Province. This is an area of great linguistic diversity and long-standing language contact which has had far-reaching effects on the linguistic situation.
Historically, speakers of Vaeakau-Taumako were shipbuilders and navigators who made trade voyages throughout the area, bringing them into constant contact with speakers of the Reefs-Santa Cruz, Utupua and Vanikoro languages. The latter languages are only distantly related to Vaeakau-Taumako, making up an only recently identified first-order subgroup of Oceanic. Polynesian speakers first arrived in the area some 700-1000 years ago from the core Polynesian areas to the east. While today most intra-group communication takes place in Solomon Islands Pijin, traditionally the situation was one of extensive multilingualism, and this has left profound traces in the grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako, which shows a number of structural properties not known from other Polynesian languages.
A Grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako is the most comprehensive grammar of any Polynesian Outlier to date, and the first full-length grammar of any language of Temotu Province. Based on extensive fieldwork, it is structured as a reference grammar dealing with all aspects of language structure, from phonology to discourse organization, and including a selection of glossed texts. It will be of interest to typologists, Oceanic linguists, and researchers interested in language contact.
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Table of contents

• Preface
• Table of contents
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Phonology
• Chapter 3: Word classes
• Chapter 4: Reduplication
• Chapter 5: Deictics
• Chapter 6: Nominal morphology
• Chapter 7: Noun phrase structure
• Chapter 8: Verbal morphology
• Chapter 9: Verb phrase structure
• Chapter 10: Prepositions
• Chapter 11: Modifiers
• Chapter 12: Tense, aspect, and mood
• Chapter 13: Simple clauses
• Chapter 14: Complex clauses
• Chapter 15: Serial verbs and related constructions
• Chapter 16: Negation and questions
• Chapter 17: Coordination and conjunctions
• Chapter 18: Discourse organization
• Appendix 1: Texts
• Appendix 2: List of grammatical morphemes