{"id":1487,"date":"2011-04-13T10:00:19","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T08:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1487"},"modified":"2011-03-30T13:23:11","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T11:23:11","slug":"kokota-grammar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1487","title":{"rendered":"Kokota Grammar"},"content":{"rendered":"
Kokota Grammar<\/strong>. By Bill Palmer<\/strong>. (Oceanic linguistics special publication 35.) Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009. Pp. xxii,426. ISBN 9780824832513<\/a>. $36.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan<\/strong><\/a>, Mumbai, India<\/em><\/p>\n

While Austronesian languages are numerically and geographically significant as a group and several of them are \u2018world languages\u2019, the majority are small and under-documented. Kokota, an endangered Northwest Solomonic (Meso-Melanesian, Oceanic) language, is one such language, spoken in three villages on Santa Isabel Island. Bill Palmer presents us with a corpus-based grammar of Kokota.<\/p>\n

The core of this grammar treats phonology (5\u201362) and syntax (63\u2013406). As Kokota, like most Oceanic languages, has a comparatively simple morphology, morphological details are discussed under syntax, and as certain phonological processes (such as reduplication) are morphosyntactically important, the forms are treated in the phonology chapter and their functions later in the book.<\/p>\n

Of particular interest in the phonology chapter are the discussions of stress\u2014which are complex and undergoing change (from moraic to syllabic trochees)\u2014and various prosodic processes.<\/p>\n

P\u2019s discussion of noun phrases brings to light a number of interesting features. There are four sets of pronouns (independent, possessor-indexing, postverbal object-indexing, and preverbal subject-indexing); demonstratives distinguish five degrees of deictic proximity; and there is a second system of counting used only by old men. Adjectival forms are quite restricted, and various spatial and deictic temporal locatives and local nouns complement the sole preposition.<\/p>\n

Of most interest are expressions of possession. Suffixes for both indirect and direct possession are head-marking and identical (except for second person singular); however, indirect suffixes are enclitic on possessed nouns, while direct suffixes are attached to one of two hosts (indicating \u2018orally consumable\u2019 and \u2018non-consumable\u2019, respectively). P devotes considerable space to discussing the semantics of each type. Possession is also expressed by a pseudo-locative construction and can be zero-marked within prepositional phrases.<\/p>\n

The verb complex includes a number of pre- and postverbal markers of tense, aspect, mood, and adverbial functions. Kokota has two exclusive sets of preverbal subject\/modal particles. One set indexes the argument highest on the semantic role hierarchy, distinguishing person but not number, and also marks three modal categories, realis, irrealis, and neutral; remarkably, it is the irrealis that is formally unmarked. Kokota also possesses a competing modal particle system that does not mark subject, and which may be in the process of replacing the system with subject-agreement. Additionally, postverbal object enclitics distinguish person and number. Kokota, like many North West Solomonic languages, has a tense-aspect-mood construction employing a generic possessor-indexing host and an appropriate postverbal subject enclitic. P\u2019s discussion of the details of agreement assignment, valency alteration, incorporation, verb serialization, existential predicates, and the functional characteristics of adjuncts present much of interest.<\/p>\n

As this is a corpus-based grammar, P\u2019s treatment of clause structure includes discussion of pragmatically marked features of verbal clauses such as topicalization, focused constructions, and omitted subject, as well as verbless equative and possessive predicates. Final sections discuss two important discourse-level phenomena, recapping and discourse use of the verb \u2018be thus\u2019. A glossed narrative text (407\u201314) completes the presentation.<\/p>\n

The book, a revision of P\u2019s Ph.D dissertation, is the only complete, modern reference grammar of a Santa Isabel language. It is a welcome addition to the bookshelf of any Austronesianist, linguistic typologist, or comparative morphosyntactician. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kokota Grammar. By Bill Palmer. (Oceanic linguistics special publication 35.) Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009. Pp. xxii,426. ISBN 9780824832513. $36. Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan, Mumbai, India While Austronesian languages are numerically and geographically significant as a group and several of them are \u2018world languages\u2019, the majority are small and under-documented. Kokota, an endangered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1487"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1489,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions\/1489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}