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The article is divided into two parts. In the first, I explore what is known about the precontact history of Collingwood Bay based on archaeological, linguistic, and oral evidence. While much must be left to speculation, the evidence strongly suggests that the Bay has long been a meeting point between Austronesian and Papuan peoples. The second and longer part of the paper attends to the political system found in most Collingwood Bay communities. I focus here primarily on the Maisin-speaking people residing in the southern part of the Bay with whom I've worked since 1981. More specifically, I describe how this system incorporates both hierarchical and egalitarian aspects and has proven remarkably adaptable to social changes from the time of European first contact in the 1890s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we revisit the concept of strong differentiability of real functions of one variable, underlying the concept of differentiability. Our discussion is guided by the Straddle Lemma, which plays a key role in this context. The proofs of the results presented are designed to meet a young audience in mathematics, typical of students in a first course of Real Analysis or an honors-level Calculus course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the currently accepted view about the origins of grammatical change that has occurred in Austronesian languages in contact with Papuan languages in Melanesia. The view is that this change is the result of Austronesian speakers' bilingualism in a Papuan language, and therefore that Austronesian speakers were the agents of change. The article presents an alternative scenario--that the grammatical change may have been the result of a process involved in acquisition of the Austronesian language by Papuan speakers, who then would have been the agents of change. This scenario is supported by a description of similarities in the changed grammatical features of the Austronesian languages and those of contact languages, which clearly did arise from a process of acquisition--namely, language transfer. It is also supported by the degree of lexical borrowing in at least one of the changed Austronesian languages, Takia, which suggests acquisition rather than bilingualism played a key role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages belonging to the Northwest Solomonic (NWS) subgroup, within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family, are spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and in the western Solomon Islands. These languages are lexically the most innovative Austronesian languages, retaining the least number of Austronesian cognates. Certain languages also show atypical grammatical structures. These innovative features are typically assumed to be the result of linguistic contact with the Papuan languages of the region. However, until Evans and Palmer's research on Mono-Torau and Uruava, research into contact-induced change had been carried out in other areas of Melanesia, but little was known about contact-induced change in NWS. Mono-Torau and Uruava display right-headed structures, including SOV clauses, postpositions and preposed possessors; these structures differ from other NWS structures and Evans and Palmer argue that this variation arose through Mono, Torau and Uruava speakers' social contact with speakers of neighbouring Papuan languages, thus reflecting contact-induced change. Recent fieldwork reveals that Mono-Torau and Uruava are not the only NWS languages to exhibit such atypical grammatical features. Papapana, a highly endangered language spoken in northern Bougainville, also displays right-headed structures including verb-final clause orders, a postposition and preposed possessors. I argue that, as with Mono-Torau and Uruava, these differences reflect contact-induced change resulting from social contact with speakers of neighbouring Papuan languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speakers of many Trans New Guinea or Papuan languages use a number of reciprocal person-referring expressions. Various examples are found in the Papuan language of Koromu, spoken in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. This paper examines the meanings of Koromu reciprocal expressions that recall shared past experiences, in particular, social category terms connected with coming of age events and spontaneous nicknames created at the time events occur in the course of everyday life. The meanings are explicated in clear simple terms using Natural Semantic Metalanguage primes. The explications point to important aspects of social cognition, including identification with significant others based on shared experience and relational concepts of personhood. Although this study points to the possibility of some language endangerment for some meanings, it also indicates the ongoing cultural importance of shared experiences, including commensality, in both rites of passage and everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, evidence is provided that suggests the Oksapmin language, previously classed as constituting an isolate within the larger Trans-New Guinea family, is related to the Mountain Ok branch of the Ok language family and, by extension, the entire Ok family. A list of cognates and sound correspondences is given, as well as evidence from bound morphology and pronoun paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Songs and other expressive forms of language may carry meaning at a range of levels. A variety of factors influence the accessibility of these different layers of meaning. This paper explores issues associated with explanation of the meaning (exegesis) of night and day dance songs of the Mali Baining people of Papua New Guinea. We draw a parallel between accessibility of meaning in relation to cultural practices such as dance complexes, and accessibility of linguistic meaning in relation to specific texts, to present a framework for explaining why aspects of meaning or knowledge may remain inaccessible to researchers in cross-cultural settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on existing insights from the field of theoretical lexicography this article gives an innovative application to the relation of divergence by introducing the notion of grammatical divergence. In bilingual dictionaries with English and Sesotho sa Leboa as language pair lexicographers are confronted with a real challenge in their endeavours to present the diverse class specific concords or pronouns as equivalents for single English forms. This article emphasizes the need for a corpus-based approach to the lexicographic practice and introduces the slash and dot conventions as a method to give the necessary lexicographic treatment to English lemma signs with different concords and pronouns as translation equivalents. The concept of remote textual condensation is explained and it is indicated how problems regarding the textual condensation prevailing when the dot convention is used can be solved by employing a text in the back matter section complemented by a functional cross-reference system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that phrase structure configurations play a more significant role in the organization of the syntax of many Papuan languages than has hitherto been acknowledged. Much of what has been described in the literature as ‘(free) variation’ in the order of constituents (and treated in the same spirit of the analysis of free nominals versus bound pronominals by Jelinek and Demers 1994) can in fact be ascribed to a well-defined set of phrase structure rules that are sensitive to pragmatic as well as syntactic information, such as is well-attested in other languages (see, for instance, Aissen 1992, Kiss 1994). Evidence, from clauses with inherently pragmatically marked nominals and adjunct nominal constructions, is presented to support the phrase-structural analysis. Adopting this analytical tool in turn leads to a structurally-based, rather than functionally-based, account of the switch-reference system in many languages, and insights into the behaviour of NV complex predicates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]