yumi/mipela

[Lise M. Dobrin]

Thanks to all who responded. It's impressive how great the 
variability can be in an area of the grammar so fundamental as the 
pronoun system. Just a few comments in return:

Nothing I know of suggests that pronoun use is becoming more like 
standard English (i.e., that the system is losing the 
inclusive/exclusive distinction altogether). Suzanne Romaine's sample 
includes data from Lae, and there she found yumi/mipela distributed 
quite according to "the rules". It's nice to see clear cases where 
Tok Pisin pronouns are used to channel distinctions that are salient 
in the local vernacular, like paralleling the dual and plural in the 
Enga/Ipili case. It's apparently not uncommon for features of a 2nd 
language to acquire functions that are rooted in the speaker's L1. 
The uses I'm concerned with are actually somewhat different, though, 
not only in that many Arapesh people are now monolingual Tok Pisin 
speakers (I actually had the strange fortune to visit Porgera while I 
was in PNG, and my impression was that the Ipili was very strong, 
with Tok Pisin virtually always a subsequent language). Many of the 
uses I recorded introduce a new distinction--not necessarily to be 
accounted for in terms of grammar as such, by the way--that derives 
neither from the vernacular nor from Tok Pisin, as far as I know. My 
intuition is that historical Arapesh speakers are often 
_uncomfortable_ with the choice that Tok Pisin requires them to make: 
whether or not to exclude the interlocutor. But the question remains 
how to flesh out that intuition into a sound account.

-Lise