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Arabic, Japanese, Lardil, Estonian, and Choctaw. Hockett (1958: 284) makes similar
observations for Fijian. As we will see, this phenomenon is also operative in Mono.
The attested word shapes may vary depending on the grammatical category of the
word. I will examine each major grammatical category in Mono separately. Also, Hockett
(1958) points out that shorter words are more common than longer words, taking the MC
into account.
The MC is most evident in words spoken in isolation, also referred to as citation
forms. The restriction may be lifted when words are spoken in certain contexts within a
sentence.
In this chapter, I discuss the word shapes attested in each major grammatical
category of Mono. In addition, I discuss the shapes of grammatical function words and
particles.
6.1 Nominal word shapes
In this section, I discuss the word shapes of Mono nouns. Adjectives and
pronouns show similar behavior with respect to word shapes, and so they will be
discussed here as well.
The following word shapes are attested for nouns spoken in isolation in Mono:
(1) Attested word shapes of Mono nouns
VCV =>=( =>=(
‘father’
CVCV IK( IK( IK( IK(
‘pot’
VCVCV BH BH BH BH
‘grass’
CVCVCV >=C >=C >=C >=C
‘tortoise’
VCVCVCV =A(@( =A(@( =A(@( =A(@(
‘hail’
CVCVCVCV =(AC>=C=
=(AC>=C= =(AC>=C=
=(AC>=C=
‘ladle’
As noted in Chapter 5, onsetless syllables are only found unambiguously in word-
initial position. The shorter forms (VCV, CVCV, VCVCV) are much more frequently
than the longer forms, both in the lexicon and in texts, which is consistent with Hockett’s
(1958: 284-5) observations for Fijian and English.
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