A Grammar of Mavea
An Oceanic Language of Vanuatu
Publication Year: 2011
Most of the grammatical descriptions derive from a corpus of texts of various genres (conversations, traditional stories, personal histories, etc.) gathered during the author’s fieldwork, conducted for eleven months between 2005 and 2007.
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
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Chapter 1 Introduction
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Maṽea is a severely endangered Oceanic language spoken by about 32 people in northern Vanuatu, on the east coast of Espiritu Santo. Although a lot still remains to be discovered about the language, this descriptive reference grammar is the first attempt to safeguard linguistic information about Ma˝vea and to provide a basis on ...
Chapter 2 Phonology
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Throughout this study, words exemplifying the phonemes are presented in their orthographic forms unless otherwise stated, that is, when they appear between square brackets representing a phonetic transcription, or between slashes for a phonemic transcription. The following notation is also used: syllables are separated ...
Chapter 3 Word classes
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According to Schachter, “parts-of-speech classes must be distinguished from one another on the basis of a cluster of properties, none of which by itself can be claimed to be a necessary and sufficient condition for assignment to a particular class” (1985:6, original emphasis)....
Chapter 4 Derivational morphology
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In this book, the term zero derivation (also known as “conversion” or “functional shift”) is used to refer to lexical items which can serve several grammatical functions without any overt morphological derivation. Zero derivation is common in Oceanic languages (Lynch et al. 2002:38), and is found in Saliba (Margetts ...
Chapter 5 The Mavea counting system
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In this chapter, the following terminology is used: in order to describe a number such as 2,946, the 2 is referred to as the thousands-place position, 9 as the hundreds-place position, 4 as the tens-place position, and 6 as the ones-place position....
Chapter 6 Noun phrases
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Throughout this monograph, the term ‘noun phrase’ refers to NPs and DPs. Maximally,
a noun phrase is composed of the following elements:
(Quant) (Plural) N (N-poss) (N) (Adj) (Det) ((lig) Num) (Quant) (Clf (N-Poss)) (Rel)
There are no examples in the data where all possible constituents of the NP appear in a single phrase given that some elements are incompatible with others....
Chapter 7 Possession
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Ma˝vea distinguishes direct and indirect possession. In direct possessive constructions (§7.1), nouns take a bound possessive clitic. On the other hand, indirect possession (§7.2) is expressed by the presence of a classifier to which a possessive clitic is suffixed (see, for example, Ross 2004:512)....
Chapter 8 Prepositions and prepositional phrases
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Chapter 9 The verbal complex
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Chapter 10 Issues in transitivity
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Chapter 11 Serial verb constructions
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Chapter 12 Simple sentences
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Chapter 13 Negation and questions
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Chapter 14 Coordination and subordination
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Appendix: Texts in Mavea
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Publication Year: 2011