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Motuna, or Siwai, is a
Papuan language The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogra ...
of
Bougainville Province Bougainville ( ; ; Tok Pisin: ''Bogenvil''), officially the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (Tok Pisin: ''Otonomos Region bilong Bogenvil''), is an autonomous region in Papua New Guinea. The largest island is Bougainville Island, while the re ...
,
Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...
. It is spoken primarily in Siwai Rural LLG. The current number of speakers is difficult to estimate since the latest figure (6,000 + 600) is from the 1970 census. Onishi, Masayuki (2000). "Transitivity and valency-changing derivations in Motuna". In Dixon, R.M.W. & Aikhenvald, Alexendra Y. Changing Valency: Case Studies in Transitivity. Cambridge University Press.


Phonology


Vowels


Consonants

The structure of the language is CV(C), with the coda being an
archiphoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
realized as a glottal stop, glottal fricative, or a nasal (homorganic to the next consonant or velar if word-final).


Grammar

Siwai is an agglutinating language that undergoes a substantial amount of morphophonological fusion. Heads and dependents are both marked. It shows case on NPs. It is ergative/absolutive. It shows extremely complex prefixation and suffixation in verbs, kinship terms, classifiers, and numerals. It tends to be verb-final, with A and O in either order. NPs can be omitted when understood from context.


Gender

Siwai exhibits five genders: masculine, feminine, diminutive, local, and manner. These are marked in the singular forms only since dual and paucal forms are all marked like diminutive and plurals are marked like masculine. These genders coexist with fifty-one semantic types, marked by classifiers. These in turn are combined with numerals, demonstratives, and possessive pronouns.


Number

The language has four numbers: singular, dual, paucal, and plural. Nouns show all four while pronouns are either singular and non-singular. First-person non-singular shows a distinction in inclusive and exclusive.


Verbs

Verbs mark person and number of core arguments. It has
split S The split S is an Aerobatic maneuver and an air combat maneuver mostly used to disengage from combat. To execute a split S, the pilot half-rolls their aircraft inverted and executes a descending half-loop, resulting in level flight in the op ...
morphology and active/ middle voice distinction. Verbs also mark one of fourteen TAM categories.


Structure

The verb structure consists primarily of suffixes: :(i) verb stem :(ii) bound pronominal morphemes, cross-referencing the person and number of core argument(s) :(iii) a TAM suffix :(iv) non-medial verbs that are fully inflected cross-reference the gender of the topical argument. :(iv′) other non-medial verbs and same-subject medial verbs mark nothing else :(iv″) different-subject medial verbs have a form indicating both aspect and switch-reference. There are some verbs that are exceptions to this structure, such as the Definite Future suffix which requires no gender marking, and some TAM morphemes in medial verbs.


Valency

Siwai has four types of valency structure: :(a) plain transitives take A and O :(b) extended transitives take A, O, and E :(c) plain intransitives take S :(d) extended intransitives take S and E Some verbs are ambitransitive and take either active or middle voice. The voice system of the language is thus a "verbal diathesis" where the configuration of core arguments determine the active or middle voice.


Classes

There are five main verb classes, which are determined by which cross-referencing morphemes they take: :(1) Sa verbs :(2) Sa verbs :(3) Irregular verbs ('be, exist', 'go', 'come', 'die', 'cry') :(4) Ambitransitive (active-middle) verbs ::(a) 'reflexive action' (S=O=A) ::(b) 'spontaneous process/event' (S=O) ::(c) 'less agentive activity' (S=A) :(5) Middle-only verbs ::(a) 'bodily action' ::(b) 'spontaneous process/event' ::(c) 'complex activity'


Syntax

Similar to many other Papuan languages, Siwai has medial verbs which are in the middle of a sentence and indicate TAM and
switch-reference In linguistics, switch-reference (SR) describes any clause-level morpheme that signals whether certain prominent arguments in 'adjacent' clauses are coreferential. In most cases, it marks whether the subject of the verb in one clause is corefe ...
.


External links

* * Paradisec has two collections of Arthur Cappell's materials
AC1AC2
that include Siwai language materials.


References

{{South Bougainville languages Languages of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville Object–verb–subject languages South Bougainville languages