Voice at the Crossroads: Symmetrical Clause Alternations in Äiwoo, Reef Islands, Solomon Islands

Næss, Åshild

doi:10.1353/ol.2015.0000

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…: 60‐2). While this raises the possibility that Proto Temotu was in fact a sister rather than a daughter of Proto Oceanic, I consider it more plausible that some version of the system was retained in Proto Oceanic (Næss , ), and that its retention is an indication of Äiwoo being a grammatically very conservative Oceanic language.…”

Section: åShild Næssmentioning

confidence: 97%

Ancient DNA and its contribution to understanding the human history of the Pacific Islands

Bedford

Blust

Burley

et al. 2018

Archaeology in Oceania

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Two recent papers, by Lipson et al. and Posth et al., have challenged current interpretations of the initial settlement of Remote Oceania. We invited Stuart Bedford, who is an author on both papers, to outline their importance, and a number of scholars in various disciplines to comment on their findings. RÉSUMÉ Deux articles récents, par Lipson et al. et Posth et al., ont contesté les interprétations actuelles de la colonisation initiale de l'Océanie lointaine. Nous avons invité Stuart Bedford, qui a contribué aux deux publications,à discuter de leur importance, et un nombre de savants de diverses disciplinesà commenter ces découvertes.

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Section: åShild Næssmentioning

confidence: 97%

Ancient DNA and its contribution to understanding the human history of the Pacific Islands

Bedford

Blust

Burley

et al. 2018

Archaeology in Oceania

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“…However, the role and syntactic function of arguments is indicated by the morphological form of the verb through voice marking (Naess, 2015a(Naess, , 2021. Each transitive verb is marked for either agent voice or patient voice, which select the agent or patient argument, respectively, as syntactically privileged for various syntactic promotion effects (Naess, 2021(Naess, , 2015b. 3 When the arguments of verbs are realized overtly as lexical noun phrases, the basic word order for intransitive sentences is sole argument-verb (SV, example 3a).…”

Section: The Order Of Agents and Patients In äIwoomentioning

confidence: 99%

An Agent‐First Preference in a Patient‐First Language During Sentence Comprehension

Sauppe,

Næss,

Roversi

et al. 2023

Cognitive Science

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The language comprehension system preferentially assumes that agents come first during incremental processing. While this might reflect a biologically fixed bias, shared with other domains and other species, the evidence is limited to languages that place agents first, and so the bias could also be learned from usage frequency. Here, we probe the bias with electroencephalography (EEG) in Äiwoo, a language that by default places patients first, but where sentence‐initial nouns are still locally ambiguous between patient or agent roles. Comprehenders transiently interpreted nonhuman nouns as patients, eliciting a negativity when disambiguation was toward the less common agent‐initial order. By contrast and against frequencies, human nouns were transiently interpreted as agents, eliciting an N400‐like negativity when the disambiguation was toward patient‐initial order. Consistent with the notion of a fixed property, the agent bias is robust against usage frequency for human referents. However, this bias can be reversed by frequency experience for nonhuman referents.

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Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo

Roversi

2024

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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This paper argues that possession is syntactically category-flexible. While it is clear that in many languages possession is mostly grounded in and operates in the nominal extended projection (Szabolcsi 1983; Kayne 1993), I show that this cannot be universal. The empirical part of this article is a case study of Äiwoo, which I argue has an inherently verbal counterpart of English ’s, an abstract transitive verb I label poss. This verb can be used by itself to form clausal possession: ‘I poss this boat’ ≈ ‘this boat is mine.’ Possessed DPs also contain the verb poss: the object of this verb is extracted, forming a relative clause. Informally, ‘my boat’ really is ‘the boati"Equation missing"’ ≈ ‘the boat that is mine.’ Given this, Äiwoo simply lacks true nominal possessives. The theoretical consequence is that possession can be mapped onto different syntactic categories in different languages. This is a welcome result, as it makes the syntax-semantics mapping as flexible as it needs to be: if possession is just a tool to assert that a certain relation holds between two entities, nothing in our theory of grammar predicts that such a notion should only be limited to a specific syntactic category.

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Voice at the Crossroads: Symmetrical Clause Alternations in Äiwoo, Reef Islands, Solomon Islands

Cited by 8 publications

References 38 publications

Ancient DNA and its contribution to understanding the human history of the Pacific Islands

Ancient DNA and its contribution to understanding the human history of the Pacific Islands

An Agent‐First Preference in a Patient‐First Language During Sentence Comprehension

Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo

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