Introduction

Motuna is one of eight non-Austronesian, or Papuan, languages from Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. It has several thousand speakers.

Typologically, Motuna is an agglutinative language with considerable morphophonological fusion. It is both head-marking and dependent-marking. NPs are marked by case suffixes. Core case markings are ergative/absolutive (ergative marking is optional in certain environments – see §2(I)). Verbs, kinship terms, classifiers and numerals show extremely complex morphology, with both suffixing and prefixing.

Constituent order tends to be verb-final, with A and O in either order. Any NPs can be left unexpressed if understood from the context.

The major characteristics of the grammar of the language which bear on the main discussion of this chapter are summarized below:

1. A five-term gender system and classifiers coexist in Motuna. Five genders – masculine, feminine, diminutive, local and manner – are distinguished in singular nouns, but these are neutralized in nonsingular number (dual and paucal are marked by diminutive-like agreement, and plural by masculine). The gender of a noun is obligatorily cross-referenced by modifiers within the same NP and/or by the predicate. In addition, most nouns can be classified into one or more of fifty-one semantic types, which can be indicated by classifiers modifying them. Classifiers are combined with numerals, demonstratives, possessive pronouns, etc.

2. Nouns distinguish four numbers – singular, dual, paucal and plural. Personal pronouns distinguish singular and nonsingular number. In 1st person nonsingular there is also an inclusive/exclusive distinction. There is no 3rd person free pronoun, and the demonstrative is used instead in deictic/anaphoric function.