A comparison of morphosyntactic features between Marquesan ...

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. ‘ua pau ‘e-kolu pō PERF complete NUM-three night “three days passed” HAW Because HAW uses monolexical numbers for the decades below one hundred (e.g. kanalima “fiy”), and because these forms do not take the numeral classifier ‘e-, the following comparison uses ‘elima haneli “five hundred” in the HAW sentence instead. (3) a. ‘e ‘ima onohu‘u ‘enana i he‘e NUM five ten person PAST go “fiy men went” (Mutu & Teìkitutoua 2002:77) b. ‘e-lima haneli kanaka i hele NUM-five hundred person PAST go “five hundred men went” MQA HAW Lazard & Peltzer (2000:162) do not list any indefinites in their description of TAH articles. However, e is given as a cognate of HAW he (p. 36ff). eir examples only give it in initial position, and not in as an article. (4) a. e manu terā IND bird MDIST “that is a bird” (Lazard & Peltzer 2000:36) b. e fa‘ehau terā ta‘ata IND soldier MDIST person “that man is a soldier” (id.) TAH TAH Tryon (1970:10) describes TAH ‘e as an article which has the same “demonstrative force” as ‘o, which in turn is “a kind of demonstrative article, meaning ‘it is’ ”. His glosses seem to indicate that it functions as an indefinite because he contrasts it with definite forms glossed for ‘o. As with Lazard & Peltzer (2000), it only appears in initial position in a manner similar to ‘o. (5) a. ‘e ta‘ata IND person “it is a person” (Tryon 1970:10) b. ‘o te ta‘ata EQN DEF person “it is the man” (id.) TAH TAH 4
SG DEF SPEC Init. Med. HAW he + − − + + HAW ‘e- − + − + + MQA he + − − + − MQA ‘e ± + − + + TAH ‘e + − − + − Table 3: Feature comparison of he and ‘e in HAW, MQA, and TAH. 3. NUMBER AND NOUN CLASSIFIERS Noun classifiers are extensive in many western (i.e. non-Eastern) Polynesian languages, however they are much more restricted in Eastern Polynesian languages. In TAH, MQA, and HAW, noun classifiers serve to mark collectives of various classes of objects, some overlapping with the plural system. Certain classifiers seem to have a more restricted meaning indicating only various forms of plurality and having no classificatory meaning, and thus these might be better called “plural classifiers” or simply “plural markers”. 3.1. MARQUESAN According to Lynch (2002:870), MQA commonly indicates plurality with a noun classifier. He gives the following classifiers: tau “group of people, animals, or things”, hatu “group smaller than tau”, po‘i “people”, hua‘a “members of a family”, pāpā “high class people”, naho “group of animates”, puke “collection of animates or inanimates”, ma‘a “clumps or groves of trees or plants”, and mou “paucal”. Mutu & Teìkitutoua (2002:81) give a rather different description of three complementarily distributed number markers mou “dual”, mau “paucal”, and tau “plural”. ese are incompatible with the definite paucal article na 2 and hence must be used with the definite singular te. (6) a. ‘ua he‘e te mou vehine PERF go DEF DL woman “the two women went” (Mutu & Teìkitutoua 2002:80) MQA 2. Mutu & Teìkitutoua here say “plural definite article na” which contradicts their earlier description “definite, specific, and paucal” (p. 75) . I presume this is a mistake and continue treating MQA na as a paucal. 5
Page 1 and 2: A comparison of morphosyntactic fea
Page 3: No. HAW MQA TAH DEF SPEC SG kekahi
Page 7 and 8: Po‘e appears to be cognate with M
Page 9 and 10: from native speakers, a task which

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