Motuna, or Siwai, is a

Papuan language The Papuan languages are the non-Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a ...

of Bougainville Province,

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. It is spoken primarily in Siwai Rural LLG. The current number of speakers is difficult to estimate since the latest figure (6,000 + 600) is from the 1970 census. Onishi, Masayuki (2000). "Transitivity and valency-changing derivations in Motuna". In Dixon, R.M.W. & Aikhenvald, Alexendra Y. Changing Valency: Case Studies in Transitivity. Cambridge University Press.

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

The structure of the language is CV(C), with the coda being an

archiphoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

realized as a glottal stop, glottal fricative, or a nasal (homorganic to the next consonant or velar if word-final).

Grammar

Siwai is an agglutinating language that undergoes a substantial amount of morphophonological fusion. Heads and dependents are both marked. It shows case on NPs. It is ergative/absolutive. It shows extremely complex prefixation and suffixation in verbs, kinship terms, classifiers, and numerals. It tends to be verb-final, with A and O in either order. NPs can be omitted when understood from context.

Gender

Siwai exhibits five genders: masculine, feminine, diminutive, local, and manner. These are marked in the singular forms only since dual and paucal forms are all marked like diminutive and plurals are marked like masculine. These genders coexist with fifty-one semantic types, marked by classifiers. These in turn are combined with numerals, demonstratives, and possessive pronouns.

Number

The language has four numbers: singular, dual,

paucal In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other languages present number categories of singula ...

, and plural. Nouns show all four while pronouns are either singular and non-singular. First-person non-singular shows a distinction in inclusive and exclusive.

Verbs

Verbs mark person and number of core arguments. It has

split S The split S is an Aerobatic maneuver and an Air combat manoeuvring, air combat maneuver mostly used to disengage from combat. To execute a split S, the pilot half-rolls his aircraft inverted and executes a descending half-loop, resulting in ...

morphology and active/

middle Middle or The Middle may refer to: * Centre (geometry), the point equally distant from the outer limits. Places * Middle (sheading), a subdivision of the Isle of Man * Middle Bay (disambiguation) * Middle Brook (disambiguation) * Middle Creek ...

voice distinction. Verbs also mark one of fourteen TAM categories.

Structure

The verb structure consists primarily of suffixes: :(i) verb stem :(ii) bound pronominal morphemes, cross-referencing the person and number of core argument(s) :(iii) a TAM suffix :(iv) non-medial verbs that are fully inflected cross-reference the gender of the topical argument. :(iv′) other non-medial verbs and same-subject medial verbs mark nothing else :(iv″) different-subject medial verbs have a form indicating both aspect and switch-reference. There are some verbs that are exceptions to this structure, such as the Definite Future suffix which requires no gender marking, and some TAM morphemes in medial verbs.

Valency

Siwai has four types of valency structure: :(a) plain transitives take A and O :(b) extended transitives take A, O, and E :(c) plain intransitives take S :(d) extended intransitives take S and E Some verbs are ambitransitive and take either active or middle voice. The voice system of the language is thus a "verbal diathesis" where the configuration of core arguments determine the active or middle voice.

Classes

There are five main verb classes, which are determined by which cross-referencing morphemes they take: :(1) S_a verbs :(2) S_a verbs :(3) Irregular verbs ('be, exist', 'go', 'come', 'die', 'cry') :(4) Ambitransitive (active-middle) verbs ::(a) 'reflexive action' (S=O=A) ::(b) 'spontaneous process/event' (S=O) ::(c) 'less agentive activity' (S=A) :(5) Middle-only verbs ::(a) 'bodily action' ::(b) 'spontaneous process/event' ::(c) 'complex activity'

Syntax

Similar to many other Papuan languages, Siwai has medial verbs which are in the middle of a sentence and indicate TAM and

switch-reference In linguistics, switch-reference (SR) describes any clause-level morpheme that signals whether certain prominent arguments in 'adjacent' clauses are reference, coreferential. In most cases, it marks whether the subject (grammar), subject of the v ...

External links

* * Paradisec has two collections of Arthur Cappell's materials
AC1AC2
that include Siwai language materials.

References

{{South Bougainville languages Languages of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville Object–verb–subject languages South Bougainville languages