[ANU Pacific.Institute] Remote Oceania settlement readings in Lang Evo & Change group

Wed May 23 15:02:25 AEST 2018

Hello fellow CHL students, Pacific Institute and Anthrograd,

This week in the Language Evolution and Change reading group, we're doing a set of papers by Blust & Pawley (resp) that deal with settlement of remote Oceania and contact and influence between speakers of Austronesian languages and non-Austronesian languages in Oceania (so called "Papuan").

This topic may interest students and scholars here at CHL, PI and anthro who don't usually get emails on the linguistics list, hence this message. You don't need to read all the papers in preparation, you're welcome to attend if you're just curious about the topic. There is a summary included here too if you want to read that before.

The Language Evolution & Change reading group is a weekly event on Thursdays at 13.00 in the Engma room here in Coombs (relocation TBA when we know). If you're interested in Language Evolution & Change more generally, we can add you to the relevant list for the reading group.

Best,
Hedvig

________________________________
From: Siva Kalyan <siva.kalyan at anu.edu.au>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2018 9:06 PM
Cc: Siva Kalyan
Subject: Lang Evo & Change reading: Triple-header this week!

Hi all,

This week we will be covering the long-promised Blust-Pawley-Blust exchange on population history in Remote Melanesia—which means three papers! But don't panic; our paper-picker advises that we should mostly focus on Andy's contribution (which, indeed, is the most free-standing of the three, and has much else to recommend it as well). Furthermore, she has kindly prepared summaries of all three papers, appended to the end of this e-mail.

Details are as follows, and the papers are attached:

24 May
Place:  Engma room
Time: 13.00 - 14.30
Paper picker: Hedvig
Papers: Blust, R. A. (2005). Review of Lynch, J., Ross, M., & Crowley, T., “The Oceanic languages”. Oceanic Linguistics, 44(2), 544-558.
Pawley, A. (2006). Nayacakalou medal address: Explaining the aberrant Austronesian languages of Southeast Melanesia: 150 years of debate. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 115(3), 215-258.
Blust, R. (2008). Remote Melanesia: one history or two? An addendum to Donohue and Denham. Oceanic Linguistics, 47(2), 445-459.

Siva

Summaries follow:

Blust (2005) Review of Lynch, Ross & Crowley (2002)

In this paper, Blust is actually reviewing a book while putting forward his on theories on pacific pre-history. He presents data on a subset of languages of Vanuatu, Loyalties and New Caledonia that are so different (aberrant) from the rest of oceanic languages that they are suspicious and suggest papuan influence. The grammatical features that he discusses are:

a) SOV word order

b) quinary counting systems

c) very low cognate densities

d) serial verbs

He also notes that skin colour, nose, beards and hair type is different in Remote Melanesia compared to the rest of Remote Oceania. He also notes other cultural traits such as penis sheaths and large nasal septum piercings.

He lists 3 possibilities for the shared features between papuan groups and melanesian austronesian groups.

“there are basically three possibilities: (1) An speakers acquired them through contact in western Melanesia and carried them eastward into the uninhabited Pacific, (2) the preceding, but both “mixed” and “unmixed” AN speakers moved out of western Melanesia together, (3) An speakers in central and southern Melanesia acquired them from Papuan speakers via contact in situ. “

He finds that (3) is most likely, i.e. that there were non-austronesian in Vanuatu when Lapita people came there.

“This leaves only (3) as a plausible alternative: the Papuan features of language, cul- ture, and physiognomy that are common to An speakers in Vanuatu and southern Melanesia must have been acquired by contact in situ. The adoption of this position, how- ever, leads to a crisis of evidence, because there are no Papuan languages spoken south of Santa Cruz, and the archaeology of central and southern Melanesia has to date yielded no indication of a pre-Lapita population. There is only one obvious way out of this dilemma, and that is to abandon the prevailing orthodoxy, which holds that the rest settlers of all parts of the Paci c east of the Solomons were the bearers of the Lapita pottery complex, hence speakers of An languages. Instead, it appears almost certain that Papuan languages were spoken in Vanuatu and southern Melanesia at the time of initial An contact, and that the Papuan features in the An languages of this region were acquired locally, rather than mysteriously imported from areas where Papuan languages are still spoken today. “

Blust clearly writes that it is likely that there were papuan settlers in remote Melanesia before Lapita people, we don’t have archeological evidence because people have biases that lead to them finding what they’re looking for.

He also finishes with suggesting that New Caledonia may have had pre-Lapita settlers.

Pawley (2006) Explaining the Aberrant: Austronesian languages of the southeast Melanesia: 150 years of debate

In this paper Andy goes through Blust’s paper and many other people’s theories and data. I’m mainly relaying what relates to Blust here, but the paper contains more than that. It's really a long and thourogh review, highly recommend it!

In this paper, Andy lists 5 different explanations for why a language (L) is so different from its relatives M and N. I’m paraphrasing a bit here:

a) genealogical diversity. M and N are in fact closer to each other than they are to L, L has had a separate history from M and N for a long time

b) Contact induced change

c) An exceptional degree of organic (system internal) linguistic change. L has undergone far more innovations related to speech production, comprehension and first language acquisition than M and N

d) An exceptional degree of socially-induced linguistic change. L has changed more rapidly than M and N because of the far-reaching effects of social processes international to the community (name taboo, esoterogeny, prestige dialects, lack of norms).

e) pidginisation. L is not a true traditional sister of M and N, but rather a hybrid of a sister language to M and N and something else.

The paper does not offer as assertive claims as Blust, which makes it difficult to summarise in a short space.

The main points that are relevant for us to link back to Blust’s work is that Andy agrees that blusts scenario (1) is unlikely, but disagrees on favouring (3) over (2). He writes that Blust underestimates the archaeological work and that it has become more and more clear that the Santa-Cruz and Reef languages are not papuan. He also points out that serial verbs and and quinary numeral evidence is not good. SVC in oceanic languages are not rare, they can be traced back to Western malayo-polynesian. They’re also quite different SVCs from those in Papuan languages, so it’s not clear that they were borrowed. He also points out that it is unclear where the quinary systems in papuan languages come from, they may have been borrowed from AN languages who may have had them alongside decimal systems all along.

Andy concludes with proposing that Blust’s scenario (2) seems more plausible, that the first settlers were lapita and that very very soon after mixed AN-papuan populations came in and that by that time, the first Lapita AN groups had already reached Western Polynesia. He writes that the first settlers may still have contained mixed and unmixed populations, but that the “unmixed” AN were clearly the first to get to western Polynesia.

Blust (2008) Remote Melanesia: one history or two?

This is the third paper in in this exchange, and it’s an “addendum” to Donohue and Denham and a "squib".

Here, we see a reconciliation of sorts of the two standpoints, and the abstract actually says it all:

“Blust (2005) proposed that certain typological traits in the Austronesian lan- guages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia—here called “Remote Melanesia”— suggest Papuan contact influence in situ. Given the absence of any pre-Lapita archaeological tradition in this area, it now seems best to frame this hypothesis in terms of two closely spaced migrations that appear to be archaeologically indistinguishable. The first wave brought Austronesian speakers of southern Mongoloid physical type into Remote Oceania. The second wave brought Pap- uan speakers who had acquired the outrigger canoe complex, pottery, and some other elements of material culture from the incoming Austronesians in Near Oceania, but who remained biologically and culturally distinct from them in other ways. In time, the Papuan languages of Remote Melanesia were aban- doned in favor of the more uniform and widely dispersed speech of late Proto- Oceanic speakers, but not before leaving traces of their former presence in the form of typological divergence toward a pattern that is more typical of Papuan languages than of Austronesian languages outside Melanesia. “

He finishes again with brining up New Caledonia.
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