Academic literature on the topic 'South Efate language. Oceanic languages. Vanuatu languages'

Nafsan (ISO 639-3: erk, Glottocode: sout2856), also known as South Efate, is a Southern Oceanic language of Vanuatu. It is spoken in Erakor, Eratap and Pango, three villages situated along the southern coast of the island of Efate (Figure 1) (Clark 1985, Lynch 2000, Thieberger 2006). Nafsan is also closely related to Eton, Lelepa, Nakanamanga and Namakura, spoken further to the north on Efate and some smaller neighbouring islands.1 Nafsan is often described as the southernmost member of the North-Central Vanuatu group of languages, and the Nafsan and Eton-speaking communities are noted to be at the core of ‘an unmistakable area of innovation’ compared to their northern neighbours (Clark 1985: 25). Though crosslinguistic comparisons suggest a clear boundary between North-Central Vanuatu languages and languages of the Southern Vanuatu group, there is evidence that Nafsan speakers have both linguistic and cultural links to the southern islands, suggestive of complex historical relationships between the populations of the central and southern regions (Lynch 2004; Thieberger 2007, 2015). In terms of the sound system, Nafsan is noted to be of particular interest because it ‘forms a transition between the phonologically more conservative languages to the north and the more “aberrant” languages to the south’ (Lynch 2000: 320), and exhibits phonotactic patterns which are complex and typologically uncommon, particularly among Oceanic languages (Thieberger 2006).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, 2004.
Typescript (photocopy). Title on cover and spine: Topics in grammar and documentation etc... Includes bibliographical references (leaves [497]-508).

In dieser Arbeit untersuche ich aus einer typologischen Perspektive die Bedeutung von Tempus, Modalität und Aspekt (TMA) in Nafsan (South Efate), einer ozeanischen Sprache Vanuatus. Ich konzentriere mich auf die Bedeutung des perfektiven Aspekts und der Realis/Irrealis-Modalität in Nafsan und anderen ozeanischen Sprachen, als Fallstudien zur Untersuchung der sprach-übergreifenden Merkmale dieser TMA-Kategorien. Um ihre Bedeutungen in Nafsan zu analysieren, untersuche ich die Grammatik von Nafsan (Thieberger, 2006) und den Korpus von Thieberger (1995–2018), gefolgt von meiner Feldarbeit (Krajinovic, 2017b). Meine Analysen zeigen, dass Perfekt in Nafsan alle Funktionen hat, die für das Perfekt im Englischen typisch sind, mit Ausnahme der zusätzlichen Bedeutung von Zustandsänderungen. Die Verwendung des Nafsan-Perfekts liefert einen Beitrag zu der Debatte über die sprachübergreifende Gültigkeit von Iamitive, definiert durch die Bedeutung von Zustandsänderungen (Olsson, 2013). Basierend auf den Daten aus Nafsan und anderen ozeanischen Sprachen zeige ich, dass die von Klein (1994) vorgeschlagene semantische Definition des Perfekts ausreichend ist, um zusätzliche Funktionen des Perfekts zu berücksichtigen, ohne eine neue Iamitive-Kategorie zu etablieren. Was die Unterscheidung zwischen Realis und Irrealis betrifft, so habe ich festgestellt, dass die Kategorie Realis in Nafsan semantisch unterbewertet ist, wie sie in Irrealis-Kontexten auftreten kann, die mit der Bedeutung von Realis unvereinbar sein sollten. Ich schlage vor, dass “Realis” gelegentlich Realis-Bedeutungen durch pragmatischen Wettbewerb mit Irrealis erhaltet. Indem ich das “branching-times’’ Modell annehme, das den Ausdruck von Modalität und zeitlichem Bezug vereint (Prince, 2018), zeige ich, dass Nafsan und mehrere andere ozeanische Sprachen Beweise dafür liefern, dass Irrealis als Modalitätskategorie, die sich auf nicht-aktuelle Welten bezieht, eine semantisch sinnvolle Kategorie ist.
In this thesis I study the meaning of tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) expressions in Nafsan (South Efate), an Oceanic language of Vanuatu, from a typological perspective. I focus on the meanings of the perfect aspect and realis/irrealis mood in Nafsan and other Oceanic languages, as case studies for investigating the cross-linguistic features of these TMA categories, frequently disputed in the literature. In order to analyze their meanings in Nafsan, I studied the Nafsan grammar (Thieberger, 2006) and corpus by Thieberger (1995–2018), followed by storyboard and questionnaire elicitation in my fieldwork (Krajinovic, 2017b). I found that the Nafsan perfect has all the functions considered to be typical of the English-style perfect, except for the additional meaning of change of state. I place the analysis of the Nafsan perfect in the debate about the cross-linguistic validity of the newly proposed category of iamitives, defined by the meaning of change of state akin to `already' and lacking experiential and universal perfect functions (Olsson, 2013). Based on the data from Nafsan and other Oceanic languages, I show that, when language-internal processes are considered, the semantic definition of perfect proposed by Klein (1994) is sufficient to account for additional perfect functions, without the need to posit the new iamitive category. Regarding the realis/irrealis distinction, I have found that the “realis” category is semantically underspecified in Nafsan, as it can occur in irrealis contexts that should be incompatible with realis meanings. I propose that “realis” in Nafsan only occasionally receives realis meanings through pragmatic competition with the irrealis category. By adopting a branching-times model that unites the expression of modality and temporal reference (Prince, 2018), I also show that Nafsan and several other Oceanic languages provide evidence that irrealis as a mood category referring to non-actual worlds is a semantically meaningful category.

This thesis presents topics in the grammar of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Central Vanuatu as spoken in Erakor village on the outskirts of Port Vila. There has been no previous grammatical description of the language, which has been classified as the southernmost member of the North- Central Vanuatu subgroup of languages. In this description I show that South Efate shares features with southern Vanuatu languages, including a lack of serial verb constructions of the kind known for its northern neighbours and the use of an echo-subject marker. The phonology of South Efate reflects an ongoing change in progress, with productive medial vowel deletion and consequent complex heterorganic consonant clusters. (For complete abstract open document)

This chapter deals with vocative and address terms of the several Melanesian languages and tries to investigate the grammatical and sociolinguistic characteristics of them. This study is a contrastive study of the six languages which are spoken in Papua New Guinea (Amele, Bel, and Tok Pisin) and Vanuatu (South Efate, Nguna, and Bislama). This study tries to clarify the characteristics of their lexicon (mainly kinship and address terms) and usages of personal pronouns and their verb inflections. Generally, the sample languages are rich in usages of these terms (kinship, personal pronouns, vocatives) whereas creole languages have limited usages and borrowed from English lexicon. Finally, this study claims that there are several rules of defining social relations and their grammatical forms.