Tongan-English language contact and kinship terminology

2016

‘[D]o all humans mean the same things by words that can be used successfully to point to the same thing?’ (Leavitt 2015: 51). This study shows that the same words used in different English varieties might not have the same meaning. The typological comparison of standardised English and Tongan kinship terminology reveals that the categorisation is based on different underlying features. While standardised English focuses on the concept of ‘core family’, Tongan merges ‘same-sex siblings’ and emphasises the concept of ‘extended family’. The emerging contact phenomenon in Tongan English is the use of English terminology according to Tongan categorisation, that is, a case of semantic transfer.

Word classes and the scope of lexical flexibility in Tongan

2017

Abstract Tongan is an Oceanic language belonging to the Polynesian subgroup. Based on previous work (Churchward 1953, Tchekhoff 1981, Broschart 1997), Tongan has been classified as a 'flexible' language by various typological approaches on word classes (Hengeveld 1992, Rijkhoff 1998, Croft 2001). This means that lexical items are per se not categorised in terms of major word classes, but they can function as noun, verb, adjective and manner adverb without morphosyntactic derivation. However, not all lexemes are entirely flexible occurring within all these constructions. So the crucial issue of how flexible Tongan really is remains. This question will be addressed by a survey based on a comb…

Review of Underhill (2012): Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: Truth, Love, Hate and War

2013