CONTENTS

• The project
• Previous studies
• Reviews
• Conceptual framework and method

THE PROJECT

While archaeological sites have revealed certain important details of Lapita culture, comparative linguistics has the power to reconstruct many cultural domains in much greater detail, particularly elements that are perishable or intangible. The present project aims to bring together a large corpus of lexical reconstructions for POc, with supporting cognate sets, organised according to semantic fields and using a standard orthography for POc. The goal of the project is to reconstruct terminologies used by Proto Oceanic speakers in various aspects of daily life. Each of the first six volumes has/will have as its core a number chapters about a family of broadly connected terminologies (words belonging to a particular semantic field). Each chapter is typically concerned with one or more terminologies reconstructable for Proto Oceanic and its immediate descendants. Generally, a chapter begins with an introduction to the issues raised by the reconstruction of a particular terminology or terminologies, followed by an account of reconstructed etyma with supporting data and a commentary on matters of meaning and form.

These volumes are intended as a resource for culture historians, archaeologists and others interested in the prehistory of the Pacific region. The comparative lexical material should also be a rich source of data for various kinds of purely linguistic research, e.g. on semantic change and subgrouping in the daughter languages.

The original plan was for five volumes, on material culture, the environment, plants and animals, human beings and their society, and a final volume to include an overview, Proto Oceanic grammatical categories and indexes. In the event, the reconstructions we are able to make have burst the bounds of this plan, and we now plan seven volumes, as follows.

Volume 1, dealing with Proto Oceanic technology and material culture, was published by Pacific Linguistics in 1998. (See dedicated Pacific Linguistics web page for further details.)

Volume 2 treats the inanimate physical world including landscape, seascape and conceptions of location, meteorology, astronomy and time, and was published by Pacific Linguistics in 2003. A second edition, slightly revised, was published by Pacific Linguistics and ANU E Press in 2007 (See ANU E Press web page for further details.)

Volume 3, on plants, treats the structure of Oceanic plant taxonomies, parts of plants, and names for both wild and domesticated plants, was published in by Pacific Linguistics 2008. (See dedicated Pacific Linguistics web page for further details.)

Volume 4, on animal terms, discusses the structure of Oceanic fauna taxonomies and contains names for mammals, reptiles, frogs, birds, insects and other land invertebrates, fish, and shellfish and other marine invertebrates. It is currently (August 2009) in the final stages of preparation.

Volume 5, on human beings, will contain terms for body parts and substances, human physical conditions and activities (disease, corporeal verbs), human propensities, emotions and behaviour, posture and movement, perception, thought and speech, and giving and receiving.

Volume 6, on social organisation and cosmology, will treat categories of person, kinship and marriage, politics (rank, leadership, conflict, social control), religion, the supernatural, evaluative terms, settlement patterns, production, consumption, trade and exchange, recreation, clothing and ornamentation.

Volume 7 will include an overview of volumes 1-6, grammatical categories, addenda and corrigenda, and a thesarus and indexes.

PREVIOUS STUDIES

A number of works, on topics both inside and outside the Oceanic group, provide valuable points of reference for comparative lexical studies. Dempwolff’s pioneering etymological dictionary (Dempwolff 1938) lists some 2000 lexical reconstructions attributed to ‘Proto Austronesian’ –but equivalent in modern terms to a later interstage ‘Proto Malayo-Polynesian’. Of these reconstructions, about 600 have reflexes in Dempwolff’s small sample of five Oceanic languages. In a series of papers between 1970 and 1989 Robert Blust published extensive, alphabetically-ordered, lexical reconstructions (with supporting cognate sets) for interstages earlier than Proto Oceanic, especially for Proto Austronesian, Proto Malayo-Polynesian and Proto Eastern Malayo-Polynesian. Blust has for many years been compiling an Austronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD) on disk at the University of Hawai’i. However, only a small part of Blust’s vast output has focused on the semantics of terminologies, e.g. Blust (1980, 1987).

Comparative lexical studies have been carried out for many lower-order subgroups of Oceanic, as enumerated on pp. 2-3 of Ross, Pawley and Osmond (1998). However, in general, Oceanic lexical reconstructions have until recently been limited by a number of factors, including: (i) a focus on questions of form rather than meaning, (ii) large gaps in the data, with a distinct bias in favour of ‘Eastern Oceanic’ languages, and (iii) the technical problems of collating large quantities of data. Only a few papers before the current project have systematically investigated particular semantic domains in the lexicon of Proto Oceanic. These include Milke (1958), French-Wright (1983), Lichtenberk (1986), Pawley (1982b, 1985) and the various papers in Pawley and Ross (1994). Although most languages in Melanesia remain poorly described, there are now many more dictionaries and extended word lists, particularly for northwest Melanesia, than there were ten or fifteen years ago. And developments in computing hardware and software now permit much faster and more precise handling of data than was possible even a decade or two ago.

REVIEWS

Volume 1 of the series, published in 1998, received long and very favourable reviews by senior linguists in the field, e.g. George Grace in Oceanic Linguistics, Robert Blust, in Diachronica. Grace (2000) writes:

I would never have imagined that such a work might be possible by the end of the century –if ever… It amounts to an attempt to reconstruct…the culture of the speakers of Proto-Oceanic… (p.204)

When completed, it seems likely to be the most significant single contribution ever made by linguists to culture historical reconstruction. (p.211)

Blust (2000) writes:

This book, the first of five volumes, is a major contribution to Austronesian historical linguistics. But it is more than that: in many ways LPOC (= Ross, Pawley and Osmond 1998) provides a model for the treatment of semantic fields in historical reconstruction that compares very favorably with such classics in the Indo-European field as Buck (1949) [a 1500 page thematic dictionary of synonyms in Indo-European languages].

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND METHOD

In making the lexical reconstructions to be presented in these volumes we will draw on dictionaries and wordlists for about 300 Oceanic and non-Oceanic Austronesian languages. The lexical reconstructions will be arrived at using the standard methods of historical linguistics, which require as preliminaries a subgrouping hypothesis and the working out of systematic sound correspondences in cognate vocabulary. However, we have set out to pay more careful attention to reconstructing the semantics of the Proto Oceanic lexicon than has generally been done in earlier work, treating words not as isolates but as parts of terminologies, i.e. words (or phrases) naming concepts belonging to a single semantic field, say, kinship relations, the parts of an outrigger canoe, or the growth stages of a coconut.

Our method of doing terminological reconstruction is as follows. First, after selecting a particular semantic field, the terminologies of a sample of present-day Oceanic languages are used to construct a hypothesis about the semantic structure of the Proto Oceanic terminology for that domain. For example, by comparing terms for parts of an outrigger canoe in several languages one can see which concepts recur in contemporary languages and so are likely to have been present in Proto Oceanic. Secondly, a search is made for cognate sets from which forms can be reconstructed to match each meaning in this hypothesised terminology. Thirdly, the hypothesised system of terminological contrasts is re-examined to see if it needs modification in the light of the cognate sets. There are cases where we are able to reconstruct a terminological contrast where we did not expect to do so. Conversely, there are cases where we are unable to reconstruct a term where we expected to be able to do so. The question will then arise whether such a ‘gap’ reflects a wrong hypothesis about the structure of the terminology, or widespread loss of a Proto Oceanic term, or whether it merely reflects shortcomings in the available dictionaries.

We are aware of the dangers of sampling from over 450 languages. The greater the number of languages, the greater the possible variations in meaning of any given term, and the greater the chances of two languages making the same semantic leaps independently. Does the (sometimes quite limited) cognate set provide us with a clear unambiguous gloss, or have we picked up an accidental bias, a secondary or distantly related meaning? Did etymon x refer to a fishhook or the material from which the fishhook was made? Did etymon y refer to the slingshot or to the action of turning round and round?

We are also aware of the danger of determining the meanings of proto morphemes in advance. The meanings of cognate sets are examined with regard to: (a) their specific denotations, where these are known; (b) the geographic and genealogical distribution of these denotations (i.e. are the glosses from which the proto gloss is reconstructed well distributed in accordance with a conservative hypothesis about Oceanic subgrouping?); (c) any derivational relationships to other reconstructions; (d) their place within a working hypothesis of the relevant Proto Oceanic terminology (i.e. are terms complementary–‘bow’ implies ‘arrow’; ‘seine net’ implies ‘floats’ and ‘weights’? Are there different taxonomic levels of classification – generic, specific, and so on?).

The strength of a lexical reconstruction rests crucially on the distribution of the supporting cognate sets across subgroups. The distribution of cognate forms and agreements in their meanings is much more important than the number of cognates. It is enough to make a secure reconstruction if a cognate set occurs in just two languages in a family, with agreement in meaning, provided that the two languages belong to different first-order subgroups and provided that there is no reason to suspect that the resemblances are due to borrowing or chance. The PMP term *apij 'twins' is reflected in several Western Malayo-Polynesian languages (e.g. Batak apid 'twins, double (fused) banana') but in only a single Oceanic language (Roviana avisi 'twins of the same sex'). Because Roviana belongs to a different first-order branch of Malayo-Polynesian from the Western Malayo-Polynesian witnesses and because there is virtually no chance that the agreement is due to borrowing or chance similarity, this distribution is enough to justify the reconstruction of PMP *apij, POc *apic 'twins'.

REFERENCES

Blust, Robert A., 1980. Early Austronesian social organization: the evidence of language. Current Anthropology 21:205–247.

Blust, Robert A., 1987. Lexical reconstruction and semantic reconstruction: the case of Austronesian 'house' words. Diachronica 4:79–106

Buck, Carl Darling, 1949. A dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dempwolff, Otto, 1938. Vergleichende Lautlehre des Austronesischen Wortschatzes. 3:Austronesisches Wörterverzeichnis. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen 19. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

French-Wright, Renwick, 1983. Proto-Oceanic horticultural practices. MA thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland.

Lichtenberk, Frantisek, 1986. Leadership in Proto Oceanic society: linguistic evidence. Journal of the Polynesian Society 95:341--356.

Milke, Wilhelm, 1958. Zur inneren Gliederung und geschtichtlichen Stellung der ozeanisch-Austronesischen Sprachen. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 83:58–62.

Pawley, Andrew, 1982. Rubbish-man commoner, big man chief? Linguistic evidence for hereditary chieftainship in Proto-Oceanic society. In Siikala, Jukka (ed), Oceanic studies: essays in honour of Aarne A. Koskinen, 33–52. Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society 11. Helsinki:Suomen Antropologinen Seura/The Finnish Anthropological Society.

—, 1985. Proto-Oceanic terms for 'person': a problem in semantic reconstruction. In Veneeta Z. Acson and Richard L. Leed (eds), For Gordon H. Fairbanks. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications 20. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Pawley, Andrew and Malcolm Ross (eds), 1994. Austronesian terminologies: continuity and change. Pacific Linguistics C-127. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Ross, Malcolm , Andrew Pawley and Meredith Osmond, eds, 1998. The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society. 1: Material culture. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Ross, Malcolm , Andrew Pawley and Meredith Osmond, eds, 2003. The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society. 2: The physical world. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Ross, Malcolm , Andrew Pawley and Meredith Osmond, eds, 2008. The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society. 3: Plants. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.