Product details
- ISBN 9783110238266
- Weight: 1040g
- Dimensions: 170 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 16 Jun 2011
- Publisher: De Gruyter
- Publication City/Country: DE
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Vaeakau-Taumako, also known as Pileni, is a Polynesian Outlier language spoken in the Reef and Duff Islands in the Solomon Islands' Temotu Province. This is an area of great linguistic diversity and long-standing language contact which has had far-reaching effects on the linguistic situation.
Historically, speakers of Vaeakau-Taumako were shipbuilders and navigators who made trade voyages throughout the area, bringing them into constant contact with speakers of the Reefs-Santa Cruz, Utupua and Vanikoro languages. The latter languages are only distantly related to Vaeakau-Taumako, making up an only recently identified first-order subgroup of Oceanic. Polynesian speakers first arrived in the area some 700-1000 years ago from the core Polynesian areas to the east. While today most intra-group communication takes place in Solomon Islands Pijin, traditionally the situation was one of extensive multilingualism, and this has left profound traces in the grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako, which shows a number of structural properties not known from other Polynesian languages.
A Grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako is the most comprehensive grammar of any Polynesian Outlier to date, and the first full-length grammar of any language of Temotu Province. Based on extensive fieldwork, it is structured as a reference grammar dealing with all aspects of language structure, from phonology to discourse organization, and including a selection of glossed texts. It will be of interest to typologists, Oceanic linguists, and researchers interested in language contact.
<
Ashild Naess and Even Hovdhaugen, University of Oslo, Norway.
