Subject
Article nominal, Torres, Banks, langues océaniennes, [SHS.LANGUE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Linguistics

Domains
Linguistique, Sciences Sociales, Sciences humaines, Langues

Description

Unlike most Vanuatu languages further south, the seventeen languages spoken in the Torres and Banks is still productively make use of noun phrase articles. This paper describes the morphology, syntax and semantics of these article systems. While these languages have preserved the contrast between "common" and "personal" phrases - often preserving the POc markers *na and *i/*e - they also have undergone several change patterns. Some articles, while remaining syntactically free, have become prefixes; in a few cases, total accretion to the noun root eventually took place. Also noteworthy is the creation of a new common article *wo: in five languages, *na has been restricted to inalienable non-human nouns with a human specific possessor - which makes it typologically quite an unusual article.

Keywords

Language
English (en-GB)

Creators
François, Alexandre

Contributors
Langues et civilisations à tradition orale (LACITO) ; Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3-Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Inalco)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Jeff Siegel, John Lynch and Diana Eades (eds)

Sources
Linguistic Description and Linguistic Applications: Studies in Memory of Terry Crowley, Jeff Siegel, John Lynch and Diana Eades (eds). Linguistic Description and Linguistic Applications: Studies in Memory of Terry Crowley, New York: John Benjamins, 15p., 2007

Relation
https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00135828

Coverage
Vanuatu

Name of newspaper