El área de los estudios culturales comparados

Although lacking inflectional morphology, nouns can nevertheless be polymorphemic—

if, that is, they are formed by combining two or more lexical roots in a single compound word. In most instances, such compounds are formed exclusively from nouns, although it is also possible for compounds to include non-nominal elements. Some compounds are readily analyzable as being composed of two distinct lexical elements (or conjuncts), whereas the sources of others are

obscured somewhat by sound changes, and still others contain at least one entirely obscure element.

Compounds may be written as multiple words (with a space between conjuncts) or as single orthographic units. This decision is not always easy. When a phonological change (especially an irregular or strictly historical one) has obscured one or more elements of the compound, then it is written as one word. When the complete phonological integrity of all the conjuncts is maintained, however, then the conjuncts may be written with spaces between.

Complications arise, however, when regular phonological processes occur where two conjuncts meet: this is especially common when one ends with a vowel and the following begins with a vowel. In the following list of fully transparent nominal compounds, most are written as multiple orthographic words, but others are written without any spaces, reflecting, in part, speaker

preferences. unduwan apïn ‘headache’ (< unduwan ‘head’ + apïn ‘fire’) wala uta ‘bat’ (< wala ‘rat’ + uta ‘bird’)

won inim ‘semen’ (< won ‘penis’ + inim ‘water’) wutïmu ‘toe’ (< wutï ‘leg, foot’ + mu ‘fruit, seed’) wutï yombam ‘sole’ (< wutï ‘leg, foot’ + yombam ‘palm’) ya inim ‘coconut milk’ (< ya ‘coconut’ + inim ‘water’)

yawe ‘sago pancake cooked with coconut’ (< ya ‘coconut’ + we ‘sago’)

Most of these are completely literal, endocentric compounds—e.g., a ‘roof’ is the ‘peak of a house’, ‘bark’ is the ‘skin (i.e., outside covering) of a tree’, a ‘grass knife’ is a ‘knife for (cutting) grass’, etc. While the head is almost always the second element, it is also possible for the head to come first, as in nil nopa ‘beard’, in which nil ‘body hair’, precedes nopa ‘cheek’.

While many compounds are completely literal, some contain a (slightly) metaphorical element—

e.g., a ‘branch’ is the ‘tongs of a tree’, a ‘headache’ is ‘fire of the head’, a ‘toe’ is the ‘fruit of the foot’, etc. Also, not all compounds are strictly endocentric. The word yawe ‘sago pancake cooked with coconut’ is copulative, since it is composed of the two main ingredients: ya ‘coconut’ we

‘sago’. The word for ‘bat’ is an exocentric compound (unless uta in the Ulwa taxonomy means more ‘flying non-insect animal’ than ‘bird’, in which case the word for ‘bat’ is a regular

endocentric compound, with the second element serving as the head).

Further compounding is possible—that is, compound nouns may consist of more than two lexical conjuncts, such as the word for ‘thumb’, imu unduwan (< i ‘hand, arm’ + mu ‘fruit, seed’ + unduwan ‘head’ = ‘head fruit of the hand’), or, similarly, the word for ‘big toe’, wutïmu unduwan (< wutï ‘leg, foot’ + mu ‘fruit, seed’ + unduwan ‘head’ = ‘head fruit of the foot’).

Compounds of this sort can be (or at least have not long ago been) used productively to coin words for novel things, such as introduced foods. The word for ‘rice’, for example, is asimu, derived from asi ‘grass’ plus mu ‘fruit, seed’—that is, ‘seed of grass’ (see 14.9).

Sometimes, compounds are easily analyzable into two discrete lexical conjuncts, but the semantic derivation is obscured. That is, it is not always clear how the meanings of two

component morphemes interact to produce the resultant exocentric compound, as in the examples below.

im nali ‘stick’ (< im ‘tree’ + nali ‘small star’)

apa imot ‘veranda, awning’ (< apa ‘house’ + imot ‘log’)

nipum amba ‘grassland’ (< nipum = kunai grass + ‘amba’ = ‘men’s house, spirit house’) Some compounds, however, have undergone (historical) sound changes that have altered the shape of one or both constituent lexemes, as in the following compounds.

apep ‘front of house’ (< apa ‘house’ + ip ‘nose’) apïnsi ‘ashes’ (< apïn ‘fire’ + isi ‘salt’)

apombam ‘middle of house’ (< apa ‘house’ + wombam ‘middle’) sinananangïn ‘claw’ (< sinanan ‘nail’ + nangïn ‘tongs’)

wandapata ‘fallow garden’ (< wandam ‘jungle, garden’ + wapata ‘old, dry’) The first word in the list, apep ‘front of house’ is the product of a still productive phonological process of coalescence, which may optionally yield [e] from /a#i/ (less common than [e] being derived from /i#a/, 2.8). The word sinananangïn ‘claw’ has likewise undergone only a minor change: the degemination of consecutive consonants (2.6.8). The other words on the list above, however, have undergone more drastic changes, that is, changes not apparently motivated by any regular phonological rules of the language: apïnsi, for example, has lost the initial /i/ of isi. These changes may reflect the sort of phonological reductions common among

high-frequency lexical items—that is, the case could be made that such compounds have more fully lexicalized than others. The word for ‘fallow garden’, wandapata, has lost both the final /m/

of wandam ‘jungle, garden’ and the initial /wa/ of wapata ‘old, dry’; and the word for ‘middle of house’, apombam, has lost both the final /a/ of apa ‘house’ and the initial /w/ of wombam

‘middle’.

In some cases—either because the phonological change has been too great or a lexical item remains too obscure—only one element of the compound is identifiable or the semantic derivation from two putative elements is unclear. Thus, for example, aymoma ‘stick for stirring jellied sago’ clearly contains ay ‘jellied sago’, but there is a no obvious connection to moma ‘a leaf tied in an overhand knot used to summon the spirit of the deceased’. Similarly, lïngïn ‘fog’

clearly contains ngïn ‘cloud’, but the connection (if any) to lï- ‘put’ is unclear.

Although most compounds exhibit two (or more) nominal elements, there are also possibly examples of nominal compounds consisting of one non-nominal element, such as limama ‘jaw’ (< li ‘down’ + mama ‘mouth’); li, however, can also be used as a noun, meaning, among other things, ‘the downstream part of the village’. Another potential nominal compound with a non-nominal element is yenanu ‘woman, wife’, containing the element nu ‘near’. Again, it is possible that this modifier can be a substantive (i.e., nominal) as well, however; and a further complication is the (synchronic) synonymy of yena and yenanu—that is, both can mean either

‘woman’ or ‘wife’. While it is possible that there was once a derivation of yenanu (*‘wife’) from yena (*‘woman’) plus nu (‘near’), now—if ever there had been a semantic distinction between the two words—it has been lost (14.7).

3.5 Reduplication?

There does not appear to be any productive morphological process of reduplication in Ulwa. There are, however, a number of nouns that—at least phonologically—appear to exhibit full reduplication. If in fact any of these is derived from a single non-reduplicated lexical root, this history has been lost to time, as the presumed root of the seemingly reduplicated word is meaningless on its own. Examples follow.

mbatmbat ‘tilapia’ (likely a loan from Ap Ma)

mbinmbin ‘grave’

metmet ‘swamp dwarf’

misimisi ‘story’

natnat ‘greens’

ngungun ‘red ant’ (assuming < *ngun ngun)

There are, however, a few nouns that appear to be decomposable into two morphemes each, one a duplicate of the other. One is the word wutïwutï ‘duck’ (< wutï ‘leg, foot’). Given the salience of the duck’s waddle and the feet that accomplish it, it is not beyond reason to assume that its name was derived from the word for ‘foot’ (of course, this could just be a case of accidental homophony). Another noun composed of a repeated element that has meaning on its own is manjimanji ‘maggot’, which is superficially composed of a reduplicated element, manji

‘3SG.POSS’. It is not at all clear, however, what an etymology derived from manji ‘3SG.POSS’ could be, and it is most likely just a case of homophony with no real connection to manji

‘3SG.POSS’.

Chapter 4 Verbs

4.1 Introduction

This chapter is dedicated to the analysis and description of verbs in Ulwa. Verbs

constitute the part of speech in Ulwa that exhibits the most inflection, variability, and irregularity.

On structural grounds, the verb in Ulwa is the simplest to identify and categorize as such.

Although many non-verbal lexemes may function as verbs (that is, they may occur at the end of a clause and fulfill the role of predicate of the clause), only true (i.e., underived) verbs receive verbal morphology (TAM suffixation). (When nouns or adjectives, for example, serve as predicates they may receive a copular suffix, 10.3, but will never be marked with the perfective/imperfective/irrealis suffixes that are only possible on true verbs.) Thus, defined structurally (that is, morphologically), verbs in Ulwa are the words that can be inflected for the full range of tense-aspect-mood (TAM) distinctions in the language.

Although verb phrases may consist of more than one word, a typical unmarked indicative clause will contain exactly one inflected verb, which will occur at the end of the clause. In a transitive clause, the (direct) object immediately precedes the verb.

Thus, a verb consists, minimally, of a stem (4.2), to which an inflectional TAM suffix may be added (4.3). To any of the TAM suffixes, the dependent-marker suffix -e may be added (see 12.3.1). Transitive verbs may be preceded by an object-marker clitic (see 7.4).