Topics in Oceanic morphosyntax (review)

This volume contains a collection of papers mostly drawn from those presented at the seventh Conference on Oceanic Linguistics, which took place in Noumea, New Caledonia, in July 2007. The conferences on Oceanic linguistics began in the late 1980s, after researchers in Oceanic languages decided to organize their own specialist conferences separately from the mother Austronesian conferences that began in the early 1970s. The Oceanic languages number some 450, more than the great majority of the world’s language families, and spread over a vast territory from New Guinea in the west to Hawai’i in the east and from Micronesia in the north to New Zealand in the south, but surprisingly are actually a relatively compact, well-defined, and low-level subgroup in the Austronesian language family, as this abbreviated diagram of subgrouping in Austronesian shows (Blust 2009).

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In spite of constituting a relatively low-level subgroup of Austronesian, Oceanic languages exhibit a wide range of typological diversity in their morphosyntax, as this volume demonstrates. However, if we exclude those languages spoken in coastal New Guinea, whose typology has in many cases been radically altered due to millennial-long contact with the structurally quite different languages of various Papuan language families, it is possible to delimit a canonical Oceanic morphosyntactic type. This idealized Oceanic language has a left-headed branching structure, that is, VO, with typically SVO or VOS clause-level constituent order (often both in the same language, as in Tolai) or less commonly VSO. Oceanic languages exhibit anaphoric pronominal agreement (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987) for both subject and object, the former by a proclitic or prefix and the latter by an enclitic or suffix. The alignment of these pronominal agreement markers is nominative-accusative, although elsewhere in their syntax Oceanic languages typically provide little evidence for an accusative alignment for grammatical relations (Ross 2004). Tense, aspect, and mood markers are also proclitics to the verb, but may occur before or after the subject pronominals, depending on the individual language, and in some cases fuse with the latter. Verbs take a range of derivational morphemes, the most important of which signal the transitivity of a verb. There are typically two transitivizing suffixes, one with the form *-i, which indicates that the object bears a more ‘direct’ semantic role to its governing verb, that is, a patient or theme, and the other, -aki(ni), which signals a more ‘accessory’ role like location, goal, or instrument. Object NPs can also undergo noun incorporation, in which case the verb may undergo a formal process of intransitivization, such as reduplication. Nouns typically do not take any inflection, the only exception being inalienable nouns that require a pronominal possessor suffix. Alienable nouns are possessed by attaching the pronominal possessive suffixes to a possessive classifier, never directly to a noun. There can be many of these, as in Micronesian languages (Benton 1968), but the minimal contrast usually made is a binary one, such as between a dominant, controlling possessive relationship versus a subordinate, controlled one, as in Tolai: ka-na pal (dom-3sg.poss house) ‘his house’ versus ra-na kankan (sub-3sg.poss anger) ‘his anger’. In keeping with their left-headed typology, head nouns in Oceanic languages are typically phrase-initial, but commonly NPs are complements of DPs, which in turn are headed by a phrase-initial D. The category D distinguishes between common and proper NP complements. Oceanic languages normally have little in the way of nonfinite clauses beyond nominalizations, which are pervasive. Though serial verb constructions are rife, subordinate and coordinate clauses are of the same form as independent main clauses. wh-words may remain in situ, perhaps unusually for such robustly left-headed languages, or they may move to a clause-initial position.

Beyond their fixed VO order, Oceanic languages exhibit some flexibility in their clausal constituency order. The first chapter in the volume, by Joachim Sabel, ‘Deriving linear order in...