Conclusion - Roon ve, DOGIVE Coexpression, and Language Contact in Northwest New Guinea: 東京外国語大

This paper told the story of Roon ve and DO/GIVE coexpression in Northwest New Guinea, though a literary critic might well object that it wasn’t really a single story but rather a loosely strung together series of tales, lacking the Aristotelian unities of action, place and time, with different things happening in different locations at different eras.

Still, the various tales accounting for the distribution of Roon ve and DO/GIVE coexpression shared a recurring theme, that of language contact.

The central plot involved the spread of serial verb constructions and concomitant DO/GIVE coexpression across four language families, Austronesian, East Bird’s Head, Hatam and Yawa-Saweru. Subplots included, among others, the replacement of a DO/GIVE VE-cognate with a probable non-Austronesian ONG-cognate in the Western Yapen subgroup, the spread of the verbalizerVE-form across the non-Austronesian languages of the Bird’s Head, the contact-induced word-order flip-flop of the reifier construction with a VE-cognate in Waropen, and the probable spread of a WANT/future VE-form across the non-Austronesian languages of the north coast of the Bird’s Head all the way to Ambel. What all of these have in common is the horizontal diffusion of lexical and morphosyntactic features, with Austronesian languages acquiring various properties from their non-Austronesian neighbors while in turn bestowing on them some of their own characteristic features.

In conjunction, the various contact scenarios outlined in this paper reinforce a view of the Austronesian expansion into the Indonesian archipelago and New Guinea argued for by, among others, Donohue and Denham (2010, to appear), Blench (2012), and Gil (2015, to appear). In accordance with this view, the Austronesian expansion was of a diverse and heterogeneous nature, involving different kinds of events taking place in different places and times. In many of these events, language contact played a central role, leading to situations in which the spread of Austronesian languages was decoupled from the spread of associated genes and cultural packages, as is typically the case in processes such as metatypy and creolization.

Like other languages of the region, Roon bears testament to the complex nature of the Austronesian expansion. While most of its actual forms are Austronesian, much of the structure of its lexicon, as well as most of its grammar, are more similar to neighboring non-Austronesian languages than to proto-Austronesian. Thus, as argued in this paper, Roon ve has a nice Austronesian etymology, yet at the same time, much of its morphosyntactic behaviour, including in particular DO/GIVE coexpression, is clearly attributable to contact with some of the non-Austronesian languages of the region.

While the genetic and cultural affiliations of Roon speakers are yet to be adequately

historical examination of Hebrew reveals that in the 1960s, tip had the ‘gratuity’ meaning but not the

‘advice’ one, which only occurs at a later date, possibly associated with the rise of social media. This suggests that the two meanings of tip in contemporary Hebrew result from two distinct borrowings that took place a few decades apart, each involving the form tip associated with a single unitary meaning. In this case, at least, the generalization to the effect that homonymy cannot spread from one language to another through a single borrowing event would thus seem not to be violated.

described, what is clear is that even linguistically, if the entirety of the language is taken into account, Roon seems as much non-Austronesian as it is Austronesian.

However, there is an alternative framing for the story of Roon ve. Following Enfield (2003:1–21), we may downplay the significance of individual languages and language families, and focus instead on specific linguistic features, viewing them as the major protagonists in the narrative. Within such an “epidemiological” perspective, the story of Roon ve told in this paper is, simplifying somewhat, the story of the coming together of two linguistic features: the first a form *bai that was present, several thousand years ago, in Taiwan, the second an abstract pattern of DO/GIVE coexpression that was present, presumably also quite some time ago, in the New Guinea Bird’s Head. The form *bai then spread, along with lots of other features, through the Philippines and across the Indonesian archipelago, reaching the north coast of New Guinea. DO/GIVE coexpression also spread, though much less extensively, remaining largely within the region of Northwest New Guinea. At some point, the two features met, after which the resulting combination continued to spread, ending up in various locations, including the island of Roon, where it can be observed to this day.

Abbreviations 1

COS DEF DEM F INAN NMLZ PERS POSS PST

first person third person change of state definite

demonstrative feminine inanimate nominalizer personal possessive past

ANIM DAT DEIC DIST IMP INCL OBL PL PRS SG

second person animate dative deictic distal imperative inclusive oblique plural present singular