Andrew Pawley

Natural selection in syntax: Notes on adaptive variation and change in vernacular and literary grammar☆

Abstract Syntactic and morphological usages in conversational and formal written English show a number of differences, both in what is accepted and what is preferred or most frequent. The central argument is that some of these variations can be explained in terms of the Darwinian concept of natural selection, in which the forms better suited to particular conditions survive or are favoured in those conditions. A subsidiary hypothesis is that English vernacular (conversational) grammar represents an older and more natural tradition, and that certain levels, and constraints generally considered to be characteristic of English grammar, e.g. the sentence level, and elements of relative clause formation, are innovations belonging to a literacy-based form of English.

Austronesian Historical Linguistics and Culture History: A festschrift for Robert Blust

This book brings together new work on Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history to honour Robert Blust. The memoirs in Part 1 reflect on Blust’s groundbreaking contributions to these fields over the last 40 years. The remaining 26 chapters contain contributions by leading Austronesianists on a wide range of topics that broadly match Blust’s own research interests. The chapters in Part 2 (‘sound change’) examine issues in the historical phonology of Austronesian languages. Those in Part 3 (‘grammatical change and typology’) deal with morphological and syntactic reconstruction at various levels, from Proto Austronesian down. Methodological and substantive issues in the genetic classification of Austronesian languages are treated in Part 4 (‘subgrouping’) and in several chapters in other sections. Chapters in Part 5 (‘culture history and lexical reconstruction’) investigate ways in which the close analysis of lexicon, in conjunction with different kinds of non-linguistic evidence, can throw light on the history of Austronesian-speaking peoples.

Typological implications of Kalam predictable vowels

Kalam is a Trans New Guinea language of Papua New Guinea. Kalam has two distinct vowel types: full vowels /a e o/, which are of relatively long duration and stressed, and reduced central vowels, which are shorter and often unstressed, and occur predictably within word-internal consonant clusters and in monoconsonantal utterances. The predictable nature of the reduced vowels has led earlier researchers, e.g. Biggs (1963) and Pawley (1966), to suggest that they are a non-phonemic ‘ consonant release ’ feature, leading to lexical representations with long consonant strings and vowelless words. Here we compare Kalam to other languages with similar sound patterns and assess the implications for phonological theory in the context of Hall’s (2006) typology of inserted vowels. We suggest that future work on predictable vowels should explore the extent to which clusters of properties are explained by evolutionary pathways.

On the Position of Bugotu and Gela in the Guadalcanal-Nggelic Subgroup of Oceanic

Guadalcanal-Nggelic (GN) is one of two branches of the Southeast Solomonic subgroup of Oceanic. Citing phonological and lexicostatistical evidence, several scholars have proposed an internal classification of GN in which Bugotu is an isolate, coordinate with a branch consisting of all remaining languages including Gela. This paper will argue that there are stronger grounds for an earlier and contrary hypothesis of mine that Bugotu and Gela form a closed, second-order subgroup of GN, here labeled Nggelic. The existence of longstanding dialect networks in the GN area means that determining the most probable directions and sequence in which particular innovations spread requires considerable interpretive work. The distribution of morphological innovations points to an early divergence between a dialect area ancestral to the Nggelic and North and West Guadalcanal languages, on the one hand, and a dialect area ancestral to the Southeast Guadalcanal languages, on the other, the two areas being separated by the rugged central mountain range. The fact that there are some lexical isoglosses shared by certain Southeast Guadalcanal languages with North and West Guadalcanal languages exclusively of Nggelic can best be explained by supposing that, after Nggelic diverged from North and West Guadalcanal, all the Guadalcanal dialects participated in a network of speech communities within which there was considerable but uneven diffusion of lexical items.

Trans New Guinea Languages

The Trans New Guinea language family, with more than 400 languages, is the third most numerous language family in the world. This article outlines the history of research on the family, defines its major subgroups, briefly discusses questions of time depths and direction of dispersal, and outlines some characteristic and salient structural features.

In Memoriam, Ann Chowning, 1929–2016

Ann Chowning died in Auckland on February 25, 2016, aged 86.1 A superb ethnographer who did extensive fieldwork in four different Austronesian-speaking societies of western Melanesia, she also made important contributions to Oceanic linguistics and culture history, including substantial dictionaries of four languages and more than 20 papers, chiefly on comparative-historical topics. She also published on Mayan archaeology, prehistoric flint industries in New Britain, and folklore. Chowning’s life and career as ethnographer, archaeologist, and teacher are well described in a biographical sketch (Huntsman with Chowning 2005) in her Festschrift, a volume aptly titled A polymath anthropologist: Essays in honour of Ann Chowning (Gross, Lyons, and Counts 2005). This memoir will focus on her linguistic work, while placing it in the context of her ethnographic research. Indeed, the two are hard to separate. The special value of Chowning’s works on linguistic topics lies in the fact that they are informed by her encyclopedic knowledge of the ethnography and the history of research on Melanesian societies. This broad and detailed knowledge was also evident in her contributions as a very active critic and reviewer. She was quick to spot flaws in certain claims made by comparative linguists who lacked such broad expertise. My file of correspondence with Ann over several decades is full of letters from her that politely and painstakingly corrected my errors or added to my data. From 1960–65, Chowning was Assistant Professor (Chair 1961–65) in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. From 1965–70, she was Senior Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. In 1970 she joined the staff of the newly established University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, as Associate Professor of Anthropology. In 1977 she moved to Victoria University of Wellington as Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, a position she held until her retirement in 1995.

In Memoriam, Darrell Tryon, 1942–2013

Darrell Tryon, Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, died in Canberra on May 15, 2013, aged 70. (1) His contributions to Pacific linguistics and language studies were diverse and prolific. Although best known for his pioneering work on languages of Vanuatu, the Solomons, and the Loyalty Islands, he did research on hundreds of languages in half a dozen areas of the Pacific islands and Australia and was a highly productive author, who (discounting new editions and translations of French or English original editions) wrote or coauthored 20 books, edited or coedited another 23, and wrote over 100 articles and a stack of book reviews, as well as jointly supervising some 30 doctoral theses. A fluent speaker of French, he also maintained an abiding interest in French South Pacific affairs. In 2004, he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French Government, in recognition of his contributions to French language and culture, especially in the Pacific, and for his work in fostering relations between Australia and France. Darrell and I were almost exact contemporaries, beginning our careers in the 1960s on opposite sides of the Tasman. He was a New Zealander who came to Australia to pursue a career in linguistics, I was an Australian who moved to New Zealand. We were both fortunate in entering academia in a decade when universities were expanding at an unprecedented rate. It was at the first international conference on Austronesian languages in Honolulu in 1974 that I first met Darrell, a tall, softly spoken fellow with a military mustache. Over the years, we corresponded and met regularly at conferences, and I made much use of some of his publications, but I got to know him much better after moving to the Australian National University in 1990. Ironically, although I was his Head of Department for 17 years, Darrell was also my boss for much of that time, in his capacity as Convenor of the Division of Society and Environment in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS). He often gave wise counsel on matters ranging from handling temperamental support staff to obtaining School funds to run conferences. Our conversations sometimes drifted from academic matters to cricket, a game we both loved. There are many kinds of linguists. There are, for instance, theoreticians who sit in their armchairs and look for universal properties of language structure and language change. There are comparative-historical linguists, who sit in their armchairs and try to reconstruct the historical development of languages. Then there are those who gather primary data by fieldwork or from other sources. Among the gatherers of primary data are those who undertake field surveys of some or all the languages of a region and those who do in-depth analysis and description of the grammars and lexicons of particular languages. And there are sociolinguists, who pay particular attention to the social contexts and functions of linguistic usages. Except for the first category, Darrell was all of these, in some measure: he did field surveys, and in-depth descriptions, and both comparative-historical and sociolinguistic work. BEGINNINGS. Darrell was bom in Christchurch on July 20, 1942, and grew up there. He completed a Bachelors degree at the University of Canterbury in 1963, majoring in French and Classics, followed by an MA with 1st class honors in French in 1964. In his student days, he was a useful cricketer and rugby player, and later in life he continued to play golf (handicap two) and tennis. Darrells first love at University was the French language, with a particular interest in eighteenth-century French literature. One might have expected him to go on to a career as a scholar of French language and literature, but fate led him in another direction. Before entering university, he had spent time in New Caledonia teaching English at the Polytechnic in Noumea. There he became fascinated by the diversity of indigenous languages spoken in New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands (about 30 languages, all belonging to the Oceanic branch of Austronesian), and in due course he decided to do a doctorate in linguistics, a discipline that at that time was not taught at the University of Canterbury. …