Vical 1 Oceanic Languages

The volume contains five background chapters: The Oceanic Languages, Sociolinguistic Background, Typological Overview, Proto-Oceanic and Internal Subgrouping. Part of 2 vol set. Author Ross from ANU.

Lapita comprises an archaeological horizon that is fundamental to the understanding of human colonisation and settlement of the Pacific as it is associated with the arrival of the common ancestors of the Polynesians and many Austronesian-speaking Melanesians more than 3000 years ago. While Lapita archaeology has captured the imagination and sustained the focus of archaeologists for more than 50 years, more recent discoveries have inspired renewed interpretations and assessments. Oceanic Explorations reports on a number of these latest discoveries and includes papers which reassess the Lapita phenomenon in light of this new data. They reflect on a broad range of interrelated themes including Lapita chronology, patterns of settlement, migration, interaction and exchange, ritual behaviour, sampling strategies and ceramic analyses, all of which relate to aspects highlighting both advances and continuing impediments associated with Lapita research.

Archaeology and Language IV examines a variety of pressing issues regarding linguistic and cultural change. It provides a challenging variety of case-studies which demonstrate how global patterns of language distribution and change can be interwoven to produce a rich historical narrative, and fuel a radical rethinking of the conventional discourse of linguistics within archaeology.

This volume in memory of Terry Crowley covers a wide range of languages: Australian, Oceanic, Pidgins and Creoles, and varieties of English. Part I, Linguistic Description and Typology, includes chapters on topics such as complex predicates and verb serialization, noun incorporation, possessive classifiers, diphthongs, accent patterns, modals in Australian English and directional terms in atoll-based languages. Part II, Historical Linguistics and Linguistic History, ranges from the reconstruction of Australian languages, to reflexes of Proto-Oceanic, to the lexicon of early Melanesian Pidgin. Part III, Language Development and Linguistic Applications, comprises studies of lexicography, language in education, and language endangerment and language revival, spanning the Pacific from South Australia and New Zealand to Melanesia and on to Colombia. The volume will whet the appetite of anyone interested in the latest linguistic research in this richly multilingual part of the globe.

This is the second in a series of five volumes on the lexicon of Proto Oceanic, the ancestor of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family. Each volume deals with a particular domain of culture and/or environment and consists of a collection of essays each of which presents and comments on lexical reconstructions of a particular semantic field within that domain. Volume 2 examines how Proto Oceanic speakers described their geophysical environment. An introductory chapter discusses linguistic and archaeological evidence that locates the Proto Oceanic language community in the Bismarck Archipelago in the late 2nd millennium BC. The next three chapters investigate terms used to denote inland, coastal, reef and open sea environments, and meteorological phenomena. A further chapter examines the lexicon for features of the heavens and navigational techniques associated with the stars. How Proto Oceanic speakers talked about their environment is also described in three further chapters which treat property terms for describing inanimate objects, locational and directional terms, and terms related to the expression of time.

In this study, the author describes the linguistic expression of space in Caac, an endangered and under-documented Oceanic language spoken in New Caledonia, from both a descriptive and theoretical perspective. Part I provides a concise description of Caac grammar, presenting a first formal portrait of this language to the reader. Part II describes the formal and semantic features of the linguistic resources available in Caac to encode spatial relationships. Part III presents the theoretical framework based on and exploring further the vector analysis developed by Bohnemeyer (2012) and Bohnemeyer & O'Meara (2012). In particular, the author proposes an additional sub-category of vectors (Head-unspecified Vectors) which accounts for the uses of centrifugal forms in Caac. The resulting framework provides a systematic account of expressions of orientation as well as location and motion, and to combine the Frames of Reference typology (Pederson et al. 1998; Levinson, 1996, 2003; Bohnemeyer & Levinson, not dated) with an analysis of deictic expressions within a single framework. Special attention, moreover, is given to the use of Caac absolute and deictic directionals in spatial constructions involving Fictive Motion. The analysis of Caac data leads us to introduce an additional category of Fictive Motion beyond those previously recognised in the literature, labelled here "Anticipated Paths", which in turn shed new light on the nature of vectors and the relationship between location, motion and orientation.

This 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