Māori: A Linguistic Introduction (review)

Māori is an Eastern Polynesian language that is spoken by approximately 160,000 people in New Zealand and has been recognized as an official language since 1987. In spite of innovative language revitalization measures—in particular, the immersion programs in preschools—the language must still be considered endangered because its natural intergenerational transmission as a first language has ceased.

Typologically, Māori comes close to an isolating language, as it has productive bound morphemes only for nominalization, causativization, and passivization. Grammatical relations, tense-aspect, and person are expressed by particles and independent pronouns (pp. 99–100), whereas number is regularly indicated by determiners and idiosyncratically by vowel lengthening or reduplication (pp. 114–15, 127–29). The encoding of grammatical relations shows nominative-accusative alignment, but a few constructions align the argument of intransitive predicates with the patient argument of transitive verbs (pp. 24–28, 115, 129). As for the order of constituents, Māori is a typical verb-initial language; it has prepositions, and modifiers follow their heads (p. 150).

The seven chapters of the present volume give a comprehensive overview of historical, sociolinguistic, phonological, and grammatical aspects of Māori. Each chapter is accompanied by up to five pages of notes that contain further explanations and additional references. The relatively brief first chapter (pp. 5–9) summarizes the documentation of Māori from the first book in and on Māori in 1815 to recent linguistic publications on grammar and lexicography, modern literature, and children’s books. Chapter 2 (pp. 10–40) is devoted to the genetic affiliation of the language and to the reconstruction of sound changes and grammatical developments in Polynesian languages, including the debate on whether Proto-Polynesian had an ergative or accusative case-marking pattern (pp. 24–28). Furthermore, it outlines the grammatical and lexical innovations that separated Māori from other Polynesian languages in prehistoric times and those that developed during the period of contact with English, although they were not necessarily caused by the influence of that language (pp. 29–37). A case in point is the development of a verb phrase construction in the progressive aspect from a locative prepositional phrase with a unmarked nominalization as its complement.

Chapter 3 (pp. 41–61) describes the phonological, grammatical, and lexical variation across Māori dialects and discusses the significance of these differences for present-day language maintenance efforts and the implications they have for the reconstruction of New Zealand’s prehistory. A number of variant forms in Māori dialects have parallels in other closely related Polynesian languages, but are unlikely either to have developed independently in the Māori dialects or to have been already present in the common ancestor language of Māori and those other Polynesian languages; one can argue that these features support the hypothesis that New Zealand was settled by different though closely related groups at different times and places (pp. 52–55).

Chapters 4–6 present a sketch of Māori phonology, morphology, and syntax. Each chapter focuses on those issues that have been of special interest in typological, historical, or theoretical research and surveys how they have been treated in traditional grammars and in more recent frameworks. The phonology chapter (pp. 62–95) covers, as expected, the phoneme inventory, phonotactics, syllable structure, and stress assignment, but also contains a very interesting section based on Harlow’s own research. Comparing the recordings of aged speakers that were done by Radio New Zealand in the 1940s with the speech of young people recorded recently, Harlow demonstrates that the voiceless stops are increasingly aspirated and that the pronunciation of vowels becomes more similar to English (pp. 75–81). The chapter concludes with a section on the Māori writing system and the development of Māori as a written language (pp. 85–92).

The chapter on morphology (pp. 96–134) starts with a notorious problem in Polynesian linguistics: the classification of words. Most lexical words (i.e., content words in contrast to functional words or particles) can occur...