A comparison of morphosyntactic features between Marquesan ...

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(12) a. ‘ua fārerei au i teie nau poti‘i i Farani PERF meet 1SG.S DO these PC girl LOC France “I met these (few) girls in France” (Lazard & Peltzer 2000:167) TAH b. ‘ua hālawai au i kēia wahi pōki‘i i Palani PERF meet 1SG.S DO these PC younger.cousin LOC France “I met these (few) younger cousins in France” HAW In comparison, Tryon (1970:11) describes nau as an article that indicates proximal plurality, similar to English “these”. He contrasts this with tau na which he says indicates distal plurality, similar to English “those”. As both are categorized with na (13) a. a hi‘o na ‘i tēra nau tia‘a IMP look hither DO those PL.PROX shoe “look at these shoes” (Tryon 1970:11) b. tau na tumu ‘anani PL.DIST tree orange “the orange trees” (id.) TAH TAH e use of tēra is confusing in example 13a because it is the distal demonstrative indicating distance from both speaker and listener. is contrasts with the stated meaning of nau which is supposed to be a proximal article. Probably tēra is a typo for tēia which is the proximal demonstrative. Tryon (1970:12) gives a “series of words indicating a group” in TAH: hui “group of esteemed people”, mā “family group”, nana “flock or herd”, taura “race or breed”, ruru “tied bundle”, ‘amui “tied bundle of identical goods”, ‘atā = ruru, pe‘etā “bunch attached to a branch”, atari “bunch picked from a tree”, pupā “bunch of small fruits”, pu‘e “collection of men, animals, or food”, feiā “group of people engaged in activity”, and ma‘a “small quantity of food or drink”. 4. CONCLUSION Several tentative conclusions are available from the data presented here. One is that the categories of “definite” versus “indefinite” are rather indistinct in all of these languages, as seen in table 1, and should be carefully revisited with new elicitation 8
from native speakers, a task which is unfortunately difficult to do in Hawaiian. e idea of “definite” is probably a holdover from researchers influenced by grammatical descriptions of Indo-European languages, and only Cablitz is careful about the distinction between definiteness and specificity in her description of MQA. Other interesting features are apparent from the positional distribution and meaning of he~‘e in the three languages, as outlined in table 3. HAW has clearly separated the two morphemes, restricting ‘e- as a numerical prefix and he as an article. In contrast, MQA is still somewhat flexible in treating ‘e as both a numeric marker and an indefinite article, whereas he is only available as an article. TAH has essentially lost the he form, or at least it occurs so rarely that no records have been made of it yet. e positional distribution of he and ‘e is curious as well, since in MQA he is only sentence initial, and ‘e can be either initial or medial if used as a numeral marker, however in contrast both HAW he and ‘e- can be either initial or medial. Finally, although morphosyntactic data are typically considered unreliable in historical comparative analysis, this research points towards the possibility of using morphosyntactic comparison as an adjunct to historical comparative study. It is unlikely that morphosyntactic comparison could be useful between languages which are separated by great time depths, however in this case where the languages in question are only separated by a millennium or two, the possibility of using morphosyntactic comparison as an adjunct method is tantalizing. Certainly such comparison will never supplant phonetic analyses, however the review of morphosyntactic differences between closely related languages may give additional weight to existing comparisons, and may lead towards the discovery of comparative similarities or differences which are otherwise overlooked. REFERENCES Cablitz, Gabriele H. 2006. Marquesan: A grammar of space, vol. 169 of Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-1101-8949-0. Elbert, Samuel H. & Mary Kawena Pukui. 1979. Hawaiian grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. ISBN 0-824-82489-X. Elbert, Samuel H. & Mary Kawena Pukui. 1986. Hawaiian dictionary: Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. ISBN 0-8248-0703-0. Lazard, Gilbert & Louise Peltzer. 2000. Structure de la langue tahitienne. No. 15 in Langues et cultures du Pacifique. Paris: Éditions Peeters. ISBN 2-87723-538-6. Lynch, John. 2002. “Marquesan”. In Lynch et al. (2002), pp. 865–876. 9
Page 1 and 2: A comparison of morphosyntactic fea
Page 3 and 4: No. HAW MQA TAH DEF SPEC SG kekahi
Page 5 and 6: SG DEF SPEC Init. Med. HAW he + −
Page 7: Po‘e appears to be cognate with M

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