yumi/mipela

[courtney jill handman]

A very similar situation was described in Miriam Meyerhoff's article
in Language and Commincation 18(1998):205-225.  This is for Bislama,
though, not Tok Pisin.  

Courtney Handman


On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Lise M. Dobrin wrote:

> 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
> 

-------------
Courtney Handman
Graduate Student
University of Chicago