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5 - The morphology of Māori

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2010

Ray Harlow
Affiliation:
University of Waikato, New Zealand
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Summary

Parts of Speech

As in all languages, the words of Māori do not all behave the same way either morphologically or syntactically; there are word classes, grouping together those items which share privileges of occurrence and/or can undergo the same morphological processes. On this, all writers on Māori would agree, but from that point on there is a bewildering diversity in the analyses proposed. This state of affairs is partly due to the range of paradigms within which descriptions of Māori have been composed. Partly, however, it is due to the fact that in Māori, as also in other Polynesian languages, there is relatively little in the way of inflectional morphology which would contribute to class assignment, while very many lexical items can appear systematically in a variety of syntactic environments.

To take the former point first, ‘prior to 1960, all published grammars of Polynesian languages were “traditional” grammars, sometimes referred to as Latinate’ (Mutu 1989:399). While this brief summary glosses over some useful discussion by earlier individual writers, it is essentially correct in that early accounts of, say, Māori grammar rely heavily and largely uncritically on the parts of speech, and the criteria for assignment of words to them, familiar from traditional European grammars. Even Maunsell (1842), who ‘would … insist in reply to those who would bind him down to the model of some of the European grammars, that Maori, like Hebrew, is altogether different from those languages in structure’ (1842:xii), uses noun, adjective, verb, adverb and preposition as the categories under which he discusses morphology and syntax.

Type
Chapter
Information
Maori
A Linguistic Introduction
, pp. 96 - 134
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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  • The morphology of Māori
  • Ray Harlow, University of Waikato, New Zealand
  • Book: Maori
  • Online publication: 28 January 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618697.006
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  • The morphology of Māori
  • Ray Harlow, University of Waikato, New Zealand
  • Book: Maori
  • Online publication: 28 January 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618697.006
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The morphology of Māori
  • Ray Harlow, University of Waikato, New Zealand
  • Book: Maori
  • Online publication: 28 January 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618697.006
Available formats
×