A Grammar of Pukapukan

Abstract

This study is a descriptive grammar of Pukapukan, the language of one of the Northern Cook Islands, which is spoken by approximately 4,500 people in various communities in the Cook Islands, Australia and New Zealand. The main focus of the thesis is a synchronic analysis of the Pukapukan language as spoken today, although occasionally comparative comments are made, both of a diachronic nature comparing the language spoken today with the language of the past, as well as externally, making comparisons with other Polynesian languages. The grammar is divided into ten chapters which cover phonology, morphology, and syntactic structure. Chapter 2 discusses the phonology of the language. Chapters 3-6 cover the structure of phrases: Chapter 3, the structure of the verb phrase; Chapter 4, the structure of the noun phrase; Chapter 5, particles which can occur in noun phrases or in verb phrases; and Chapter 6, the prepositional phrase. Simple clause structure is discussed in Chapter 7 together with syntactic processes occurring within the clause. Negation and interrogatives are examined in Chapters 8 and 9. Finally, Chapter 10 covers compound and complex sentence types including coordination, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses and nominalisations. Several aspects of Pukapukan grammar are related to current linguistic debate or typological issues: case marking and transitivity, the use of possession to encode agents, negation, nominalisations and split predicates. There is a phonetic and syntactic description of the definitive accent which has previously been well described only for Tongan. The notion and relevance of the category 'subject' is discussed with reference to Chung (1978) and Dukes (1998, 2002) who advocate two opposing views for ergative Polynesian languages.