yumi/mipela

[Richard Scaglion]

I know that the sort of "non-standard" (?) usages for yumi and mipela that 
you describe are common in various parts of the Sepik, and were one of the 
means by which TP speakers from other areas could always identify me as a 
"Sepik" when I worked in Port Moresby.

Rick

--On Friday, November 24, 2000 3:50 PM -0500 "Lise M. Dobrin" 
<dobrin at virginia.edu> wrote:r

> I wonder whether anyone has any insight into yumi vs mipela, which,
> according to all official descriptions I know of (not least of which
> Mihalic's), are supposed to encode an inclusive/exclusive distinction. I
> have been thinking about this since my fieldwork in the East Sepik "west
> coast"/Arapesh-speaking area, where the use of these pronouns often fails
> to correspond to the written descriptions. So I would hear things like
> "Yumi bai wokim nupela hauskuk gen", where the speaker was telling me
> about her family's plans to build a new hauskuk when the old one rotted
> and there was no way (under even the laxest criteria) in which I should
> be figured a part of her family, or even part of the surrounding
> community, since I would be long gone from the village by the time the
> building would take place. At the same time, there are situations where
> the speaker's choice of 1st pl pronoun is best interpreted as some sort
> of focusing mechanism that depends on the inclusive/exclusive distinction
> while not being determined by it. So while walking with my hostess in an
> unfamiliar village, she pointed out the path we were about to turn onto
> by saying "em ia em i rot bilong mipela", meaning essentially "this is
> the path that goes to our camp (as opposed to other people's)". But she
> might also have said "em i rot bilong yumi" meaning something like "this
> is the path we're going to take". The latter form would have been
> especially appropriate if there were others walking along with us who
> would NOT be taking that path, i.e., with the "inclusive" implying an
> exclusion of another sort.
>
> I know that shifter pronouns often show behaviors like these, but since
> certain uses explicitly contradict the official description, might there
> be a place for mentioning them in a dictionary? The more immediate
> question is, how widespread is this pattern? Have people heard unofficial
> uses that conform to different patterns than the ones I'm describing
> here? Suzanne Romaine discusses children's use of such "communal" we in
> her 1992 book on change in TP, and that discussion also appears in a
> 'Language and Linguistics in Melanesia' volume from around the same time.
> She notes some tendency for communal we to occur in samples from areas
> where the indigenous lg doesn't have an inclusive/exclusive distinction.
> Arapesh doesn't have the distinction, which is consistent with this.
> Romaine doesn't really interpret the pattens she records, although she
> does appear to assume that the official description is accurate for Tok
> Pisin historically, which may or may not be true. Somewhere in her
> 'Mountain Arapesh'--which is based on research done in the
> 1930s--Margaret Mead mentions that her informant would "incorrectly" use
> yumi as an object of bilong when he should have been using mipela.
>
> --Lise Dobrin
>