Download some grammatical properties of samoan kin terms

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SOME
GRAMMATICAL
PROPERTIES
SAMOAN
KIN
OF
TERMS
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Niklas Jonsson
Department of Linguistics
Stockholm University
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© 1999 Niklas Jonsson
First printed 1999 and 2000
Third printing 2001
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Suggested citation for this paper
Jonsson, Niklas. 1999. Some grammatical properties of Samoan kin
terms (M.A. thesis in linguistics; 3rd printing (2001) available in pdf
format at URL: http://www.ling.su.se/staff/niki/writings/501ver-d.pdf).
Stockholm. Stockholm University, Department of linguistics
A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts
Supervisor: Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of abbreviations ......................................................................................................................................vii
1. INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................1
2. KIN TERMS IN GRAMMAR: TERMS AND CONCEPTS..................................................2
2.1. Some basic terminology with regards to kinship...................................................................................... 2
2.2. Reference versus predication of kin terms ............................................................................................... 3
2.3. Referents and anchors .............................................................................................................................. 3
2.4. Grammatic versus semantic person.......................................................................................................... 5
2.5. Some further taxonomy of kin terms........................................................................................................ 6
3. EARLIER RESEARCH.............................................................................................................7
3.1. Kinship terminologies .............................................................................................................................. 7
3.2. The semantics of kin terms and componential analysis............................................................................ 8
3.3. Markedness theory applied to kin terms and kinship terminologies......................................................... 9
3.4. Cross-linguistic phonetic similarities between parental kin terms.......................................................... 10
3.5. Speech act studies of kin terms .............................................................................................................. 11
3.6. Kin terms in historical linguistics........................................................................................................... 12
3.7. Grammatical properties of kin terms...................................................................................................... 12
4. THE SAMOAN LANGUAGE.................................................................................................16
4.1. Some notes on Samoan grammar ........................................................................................................... 16
4.2. Samoan kin terms................................................................................................................................... 18
5. SOURCES OF DATA AND METHOD OF ANALYSIS .....................................................22
5.1. The data ................................................................................................................................................. 22
5.2. Method of analysis................................................................................................................................. 24
6. SOME DIFFERENT USES OF KIN TERMS IN SAMOAN ..............................................27
6.1. Referential, vocative and predicative uses ............................................................................................. 27
6.2. Anchors and referents ............................................................................................................................ 29
6.3. Bare nouns ............................................................................................................................................. 34
6.4. Contextual versus out-of-focus implicit anchors.................................................................................... 39
7. POSSESSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS........................................................................................42
8. MARKEDNESS HIERARCHIES ..........................................................................................46
8.1. Consanguineal versus affinal kin terms.................................................................................................. 46
8.2. Ascending versus descending kin terms................................................................................................. 46
8.3. Lineal versus collateral kin terms........................................................................................................... 48
8.4. Generational distance............................................................................................................................. 48
9. PREDICATIVE KIN TERM NPs AND RELATED CASES...............................................49
10. KIN TERMS AS VERBS.......................................................................................................54
10.1. Verbs and nouns................................................................................................................................... 54
10.2. Samoan constructions involving kin verbs........................................................................................... 54
10.3. Kin verb semantics............................................................................................................................... 57
10.4. Availability of TAM particles with kin verbs ...................................................................................... 60
11. KIN TERMS MODIFYING VERBS AND NOUNS...........................................................63
11.1. Kin terms modifying verbs................................................................................................................... 63
11.2. Kin terms modifying nouns.................................................................................................................. 66
12. CONCLUDING DISCUSSION.............................................................................................69
Literature references..................................................................................................................................... 71
Appendix A.................................................................................................................................................... 75
Appendix B.................................................................................................................................................... 77
Appendix C ................................................................................................................................................... 78
Appendix D ................................................................................................................................................... 80
LIST OF ABBREVATIONS
1
2
3
A
ACC
ANA
C
CAUS
DEF
DEM
DIM
EM
EMPH
ERG
EX
FEM
FUT
HUM
IJ
IM
IN
INCH
K
first person
second person
third person
affinal
accusative case
anaphoric marker
consanguineal
causative
definite reference
demonstrative pronoun
diminutive
emotional
emphatic
ergative case
exclusive
feminine gender
future tense
classifier denoting human beings
interjection
imperfective aspect
inclusive
inchoative perfect tense/aspect
kin type expressed by a certain kin term
MASC
NP
NR
O
PAST
PL
POSS
PP
PR
PROG
PROP
PT
Q
REFL
S
SG
SPEC
SUBCL
TAM
UNS
V
VP
masculine gender
noun phrase
nominalizing suffix
direct object
past tense
plural
possessive marker (indicating the possessor)
prepositional phrase
presentative case
progressive present tense/aspect
proprial marker
perfective aspect
question marker
reflexive
subject
singular
specific reference
subclause marker
tense/aspect/mode
unspecified tense
verb
verb phrase
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
1. INTRODUCTION
In many languages kin terms appear to be a group of nouns that have special grammatical
properties which set them apart from most other nouns. For instance, unlike most nouns,
kin terms may obligatorily or optionally be used without determiners, like in the English
sentence Dad is busy. Another similar example is found in Standard Italian where kin terms
are exceptions to the rule that possessive pronouns are usually combined with a definite
article, like in la mia casa, 'my house', versus mia madre, 'my mother' (Dahl/KoptjevskajaTamm, forthcoming).
However, while kin term studies are common in anthropology, where the focus is on the
cultural and social aspects of kinship systems and the meaning of kin terms, they are much
less so in linguistics. And the works that have as their main topic the grammatical
properties of kin terms are quite few. This paper aims at investigating how kin terms are
used in the grammar of the Samoan language1 as compared to other nouns – and other verbs
(since Samoan kin terms also have a verbal usage) – in order to determine whether kin
terms are treated differently, and if so, in what way. Another question which will be
addressed throughout this paper is if there are any differences in usage among Samoan kin
terms internally. By the term 'grammar', I am referring to morphological and syntactic as
well as semantic aspects of language.
After this introductory chapter, chapter 2 discusses some important concepts with
regards to kin terms, and introduces some technical terminology. Chapter 3 is a review of
earlier research related to kin terms, while chapter 4 takes up some aspects of Samoan
grammar and gives a detailed introduction of Samoan kin terms. In chapter 5, some facts
about the data used as a basis for this study are presented, and the method of analysis is
discussed. Chapter 6 constitutes a presentation of different uses of kin terms in Samoan.
Chapter 7 deals with kin terms in possessive constructions while chapter 8 discusses kin
terms in markedness hierarchies. Chapters 9 and 10 presents predicative uses of Samoan kin
terms, the former concerns predicative kin term NPs and related cases while the latter deals
with kin terms as verbs. Kin terms may also appear as modifiers in Samoan, and such cases
are discussed in chapter 11, before the concluding discussion in chapter 12.
1
Samoan belongs to the Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, and is spoken in the Samoan
Islands in the South Pacific by approximately 211,000 persons. Samoan is also spoken natively by a large
number of Samoans outside Samoa; most of them – approximately 128,000 – living in New Zealand or the
USA (Douglas/Douglas, 1994). Politically the Samoan Islands are divided into the independent country of
Western Samoa and the American territory of American Samoa. In 1997 Western Samoa officially changed its
name to Samoa, but in order to distinguish between the country of Samoa and the Islands of Samoa, I refer to
the country of Samoa by its former name, Western Samoa.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
2. KIN TERMS IN GRAMMAR: TERMS AND CONCEPTS
This chapter presents a general discussion of kin terms in grammar as a base for the more
specific discussion of the grammatical properties of Samoan kin terms. Some important
concepts will be taken up, and some technical terminology will be introduced.
2.1. Some basic terminology with regards to kinship
Kin relations can be described by kin types. A kin type is an arbitrarily detailed description
of a certain kind of kin relation. For instance, we may say that all relatives of the same
generation constitute a single kin type. We can also be more specific and say that siblings
constitute one kin type and cousins another. Of course, we may be even more detailed and
say that father's brother's son, father's brother's daughter, father's sister's son, father's sister's
daughter, etc, all constitute different kin types. Depending on how detailed one is in a
specific case, a kin term may cover many kin types, or vice versa.
The technical term consanguineal kinship refers to kinship established biogenetically;
i.e. consanguineal kinsmen are those related by blood. The term affinal kinship, on the
other hand, refers to kinship established through marital ties – not only between a husband
and wife but also between a person and the consanguineal relatives of that person's spouse.
Collateral kinship involves sibling ties, while lineal kinship does not. For instance, a
person is related to his/her father, daughter or grandparents by means of lineal kinship, but
to his/her sister, uncle (parent's sibling) or cousin (parent's sibling's off-spring) by means of
collateral kinship.2 Related to the concept of collateral kinship are the concepts of parallel
kinship and cross kinship. Parallel kinship involves sibling ties where the siblings in
question are of the same sex, while cross kinship involves sibling ties where the siblings are
of opposite sex. A parallel cousin, for instance, is either father's brother's off-spring or
mother's sister's off-spring, while a cross cousin is either father's sister's off-spring or
mother's brother's off-spring. Sometimes the concept of parallel kinship is expanded to
include lineal kin terms, where the same-sex tie is a lineal one rather than a collateral one,
and thus the terms paternal grandfather (father's father) and maternal grandmother
(mother's mother) may count as kin terms expressing parallel kinship.
An explaining note should perhaps also be made about the meaning of three of the words
used in some of my translations of the Samoan kin terms. I use the word off-spring in the
sense 'immediate off-spring', i.e. someone's sons and/or daughters, and not in the wider
sense, 'all descendants of a certain individual', also used sometimes. Nuclear family refers
to a couple and their off-spring, while extended family includes any number of other
relatives in addition to the members of the nuclear family.
2
Sometimes however, especially in the anthropological literature, siblings are classified as lineal relatives.
2
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
2.2. Reference versus predication of kin terms
Kin terms may be used in different ways. They may be said to have a referential use when
referring to kinsmen, like in I saw your uncle today, or they may be said to have a
predicative use when predicating a kin type of a kinsman or group of kinsmen, such as in
She is my sister. A special kind of referential function is found when kin terms are used to
address a kinsman or a group of kinsmen directly with the intention to bring him or them
into the speech situation. They are known as vocatively used kin terms, or simply as kin
terms of address. Kin terms with a vocative use fall outside the syntactic structure of a
clause, as exemplified by a sentence like Mom, I have to go now. Non-vocative referential
uses may be called designative uses (cf. Chao, 1956), but usually they are simply termed
referential uses (without including vocatives). I will adhere to the latter convention in this
paper since it is an established use.
The distinction between referential and vocative uses of kin terms is the one traditionally
made in the anthropological and linguistic literature, while predicative uses are commonly
ignored (one exception being Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming)).
2.3. Referents and anchors
Since kin terms relate persons or groups of people to other persons or groups of people by
means of kinship, they are inherently relational. They relate the referent of the term to what
will here be called the anchor (following Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming)), i.e. the
person, or group of people, from whose perspective the kinship relation is calculated. If I
say something like My niece won the race, my niece is the referent while I am the anchor, as
indicated by the first person possessive pronoun my.
The anchor of kinship relations is usually called 'ego' (see e.g. Keesing, 1975) or
'propositus' (Evans, forthcoming) by anthropologists. In the linguistic literature, the term
'relatum' is also in use (Amith/Smith-Stark, 1994). While 'anchor', 'relatum', and 'propositus'
may have a broader linguistic use also labelling other relational entities than entities of kin
relations (for example the possessor in possessive constructions in general), 'ego' is used
exclusively in descriptions of kin relations. From a linguistic point of view, the term 'ego'
may misleadingly be taken to refer only to the speaker (which is not necessarily so of
course), and I shall not be using it in this paper. The reason why I have chosen to use
'anchor' is that the term seems more or less self explanatory – or at least to a higher degree
so than 'propositus' and 'relatum'.
The notion of anchor is particularly clear for referential and vocative uses of kin terms,
since they in most cases have clear-cut referents who can be related to clear-cut anchors.
Kin terms used predicatively do not have referents and anchors in the same sense, since
they predicate a kin type rather than refer to a kinsman. But in most cases with kin terms
used predicatively, the referent of the constituent that assumes the kin type expressed by the
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
predicate may also be seen in a wider perspective as the referent, not of the kin term itself
but of the kin relation expressed by it. Likewise, the constituent that assumes the anchor
role may be seen as the anchor. Thus, in Tim is Henry's uncle, Tim is the referent and Henry
is the anchor of the kin relation expressed by the kin term uncle.
In many languages, the anchors of referential and vocative kin terms do not have to be
explicitly indicated by means of lexical items or grammatical markers. Anchors of kin
terms used this way may thus be called implicit anchors as opposed to anchors overtly
expressed, which may be called explicit anchors (Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm, forthcoming).
Kin terms with implicit anchors may be used on their own as bare nouns without any
determiners (i.e. articles, demonstratives or possessive pronouns) or lexical modifiers, or
they may be used in combination with various determiners (and optionally also with lexical
modifiers) in full NPs which, however, make no reference to an anchor. An example of the
first case is presented by the clause I will ask dad, where dad appears as a bare noun, and an
example of the second case is presented by the clause The proud father smoked his cigar,
where father appears as the head of a definite NP. Kin terms with implicit anchors may also
lack determiners while they are still combined with lexical modifiers, as exemplified by the
clause Take care, dear son, where son appears without any determiner but is modified by
dear. Such kin terms end up somewhere between bare nouns and full-fledged NPs (since
they are not bare but still lack determiners). For the purposes of this paper we may call such
constructions expanded nominals.
We may also make another distinction with regard to implicit anchors. In some cases
their identity may be, and must be for the expression to be understood correctly, inferred
from the context and situation in which the utterance in question occurs. I shall call this
kind of implicit anchors contextual anchors. As an example we may give the clause Mom
went shopping, where the anchor of mom must be inferred from the context for the clause to
be understood. In other cases, the identity of the anchor is of no importance in contrast to
the quality of the kin type denoted by the kin term in question. As with contextual anchors,
the identity of these anchors may be inferred from the context, but in contrast to contextual
anchors it is not a necessity for the expression to be understood correctly. I shall call this
latter kind of implicit anchors out-of-focus anchors. As an example we may give the
clause The mothers went shopping, where for the NP the mothers the quality of motherhood
is in focus, while the identity of the anchor is not. In English, kin terms used as bare nouns
have contextual anchors, while kin terms in NPs including determiners without reference to
an anchor have out-of-focus anchors (cf. the English examples with dad and the proud
father above), but this division need not be so consistent in other languages (as we shall see
below for Samoan (section 6.4)).
Also for kin terms used predicatively, there may be a lack of explicit anchors, as in the
clause He has become a father. In this clause the subject, he, assumes the referent role of
the kin relation predicated, while there is no constituent that assumes the anchor role. Since
it is not necessary to know the identity of the anchor for the expression to be understood
correctly, we may also talk about out-of-focus anchors in such cases.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
In some languages, including Samoan, it is possible to use kin terms as modifiers of
nouns and verbs in the way exemplified below3 (see further chapter 11).
(b) fai
a"va"
team same.sex.sibling
do
wife
'sibling team' or 'team of siblings'
'be married' (said of a man)
(1) (a) 'au
uso
In these cases, it is not transparent how to make out the identity of anchors or even referents
of the kin terms, since they are non-specific and merely indicate that the event expressed by
the verb or the entity referred to by the noun generally involves the kin type denoted by the
kin term in question. In line with the definition given above, we may also consider the
anchors to be out-of-focus anchors in such cases.
2.4. Grammatic versus semantic person
Grammatically, we can distinguish between first person, expressed by first person pronouns, second person, expressed by second person pronouns, and third person, expressed by
third person pronouns or nouns. Semantically, we can say that the speaker is first person,
the one spoken to is second person, and the one spoken about is third person. Thus, we may
distinguish grammatical person from semantic person. Normally, grammatical and
semantic person coincide, so that one speaks of oneself in the first person, etc. However,
one may also speak of oneself in third person, like in the clause Do you want to sit with
daddy [speaker] when he is eating. In this case, daddy is a noun – third person
grammatically – but refers to the speaker – first person semantically. Also, he in the
subclause – a third person pronoun – refers to the speaker – first person semantically.
The distinction between grammatical and semantic person is not traditionally made, but
may be useful in determining the identity of referents and anchors in such cases as
exemplified by the clause above. As a rule, I will refer to semantic person in discussing the
person of kin term anchors and referents.
3
With respect to Samoan orthography, some explanatory notes may be in place. Samoan is written in the Latin
alphabet with the addition of two diacritic signs. An apostrophe, ', indicates a voiceless glottal stop which is a
phoneme in the language, and since vowel quantity is contrastive a macron over a vowel, e.g. a" , indicates that
it is long. However, the official policy of the Education Department of Western Samoa is that these diacritics
should only be used in the cases where a clarification is absolutely necessary to avoid ambiguity, which means
they are rarely used at all in Samoan writing. Nevertheless, all Samoan examples in this paper are given
according to the spelling convention which includes macrons and apostrophes, in order to facilitate reading
and comparison between examples. With respect to kin terms, this is particularly helpful in order to
distinguish between such pairs as tama, 'off-spring of female', and tama" , 'father'; and matua, 'parent', and
ma" tua, 'parents'. When missing, diacritics have been added in examples taken from the text corpus and the
linguistic literature. Furthermore, it may be noted that the letter g is used in Samoan to indicate a velar nasal
consonant.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
2.5. Some further taxonomy of kin terms
With respect to the generation affiliation of the referent and anchor, we may distinguish
between ascending, descending and horizontal kin terms (Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm,
forthcoming). Ascending kin terms are terms like 'father', 'grandmother' and 'uncle', whose
referents belong to a generation (one step or more) above the generation of the anchor;
descending kin terms are terms like daughter, niece and grandson, whose referents belong
to a generation (one step or more) below the generation of the anchor; while horizontal kin
terms are terms like brother, sister and cousin, where the referent and anchor belong to the
same generation. Note that these labels are not applicable to collective terms, like family,
which may refer to people from generations both above and below the anchor, or certain
reciprocal terms spanning more than one generation, like wawu in the Australian language
Ilgar, which is used by grandparents for their grandchildren as well as by grandchildren for
their grandparents.
Terms that have their basic use within the kinship system of a language, i.e. that refer
relationally to kinsmen, may be called proper kin terms. In English, terms like mother,
father, brother and sister, etc, are proper kin terms. In addition to these, there are terms in
many languages that have one use within the kinship system referring relationally to kinsmen, and another, typically non-relational but at least equally basic, use outside the kinship
system. Such terms may be called improper kin terms. As examples we can take the English terms child and old man, which may refer to a son or daughter, and to a father respectively, but also to young humans, and to an aged male human, respectively. Sometimes,
improper kin terms are merely metaphoric extensions of originally non-relational terms, as
is the case with old man. In other cases, the two uses of an improper kin term are both
equally established, the term child being an example. The kin term use of such terms,
however, may also originally have come about as metaphoric extensions of non-relational
terms. Proper kin terms may slso be metaphorically extended. For instance, the English
term father may refer to a catholic priest, or to the Christian god, in addition to its basic
reference to a kinsman. (The terms 'proper and improper kin terms' were first introduced by
Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming).)
We may define simple kin terms as those describing a kin relation between two people
by involving reference to only one kinsman. Simple kin terms may be monomorphemic,
like the term mother, or multimorphemic, like grandmother. A kin relation between two
people may also be described by explicitly linking a number of kinsmen to each other. In
such cases we may talk about analytic kin circumlocutions. Quite obviously, uncle is a
simple kin term, while cousin of my mother is an analytic kin circumlocution in English.
What is a simple kin term in one language may of course not necessarily be a simple kin
term in another language. Some kin terms in some languages may also end up somewhere
in between simple kin terms and analytic kin circumlocutions. The Swedish kin term
farmor, 'paternal grandmother', illustrates this point. Since far means father and mor
mother, the term literally means 'father-mother' and thus links a person to his/her grandmother via his/her father. For this reason it could be called an analytic kin circumlocution.
But since juxtaposition is not the normal strategy for creating genitive expressions in
Swedish, and since farmor is used as one conceptual unit, the term could also be thought of
as a simple kin term (although it is bimorphemic rather than monomorphemic).
6
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
3. EARLIER RESEARCH
Kin terms and kinship systems have been studied in both linguistics and anthropology.
While the latter discipline has a long tradition in the field, spanning at least three centuries,
kin term studies seem to have been taken up in linguistics quite recently, in fact only during
the last century. The linguistic study of kin terms has mainly been concerned with the
semantics of kin terms – a heritage from anthropology – and, with few exceptions, only
briefly with their grammatical properties.
The sections below are an outline of earlier research – both linguistic and anthropological – that relates to kin terms and kinship.
3.1. Kinship terminologies
Different cultures and languages employ different kinship terminologies. They differ with
respect to shich specific kin terms they include and how kinsmen are grouped together and
labelled with different kin terms. For instance, while English has one term cousin (parent's
siblings off-spring), another language may separate different kinds of cousins, e.g. maternal
from paternal cousins, or female from male cousins, etc.
Kinship terminologies of the languages of the world can be grouped into different types.
The set of types may differ from one typology to another depending on the criteria by which
the types are defined. Below is an outline of the typologies for kinship terminologies most
frequently referred to in the anthropological literature.
Morgan (1870 [quoted in Schusky, 1983]) distinguished between only two types;
'descriptive' and 'classificatory' terminologies. Descriptive terminologies are those that
separate certain collateral relations, for instance those that employ different kin terms for
father and paternal uncle (like English), while classificatory terminologies are those that do
not make such distinctions.
Lowie (1928) recognised four types of terminologies; 'generational', 'lineal', 'bifurcate
merging', and 'bifurcate collateral'. These are based on either the female or the male
relatives of the first ascending generation. Using the male relatives, Lowie's (1928)
typology can be described in the following way: (i) generational terminologies employ one
and the same kin term for father, father's brother and mother's brother; (ii) lineal
terminologies employ one term for father and another for father's brother and mother's
brother (as in English); (iii) bifurcate merging terminologies have one and the same term
for father and father's brother and another for mother's brother; and (iv) bifurcate collateral
terminologies employ three different kin terms for these three kin types. A fifth type, noted
by Murdock (1947), is logically possible, but not found in any language, viz. a type where
there is one term for father's brother and another for father and mother's brother.
Murdock (1949), concentrating on the terms for cousins and siblings, presented a further
detailed typology of kinship terminologies, which is perhaps the one most frequently used
in the anthropological literature today. His six types are called 'Hawaiian', 'Eskimo',
'Sudanese', 'Iroquois', 'Crow', and 'Omaha'. The Hawaiian type has the same terms for
cousins as for siblings; the Eskimo type has different terms for siblings and cousins (as in
7
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
English); the Sudanese type separates siblings from cousins and distinguishes among some
different cousin types (viz. cross cousins versus parallel cousins, and paternal cousins
versus maternal ones); the Iroquois type equates parallel cousins with siblings but separates
these from cross cousins; the Crow type is like the Iroquois type with regards to siblings
and cousins, but is different in that it also equates maternal cross cousins with brother's
children, thus skewing generations; the Omaha type is a mirror image of the Crow type,
since it equates paternal cross cousins with sister's children.
More detailed kinship typologies for specific parts of the kin term lexicon (e.g.
typologies for sibling terminologies, grandparental terminologies, etc) have also been
developed (see for example Murdock, 1970).
3.2. The semantics of kin terms and componential analysis
The main interest for the anthropologist with regard to kin terms is the cultural and
sociological aspect of kinship, i.e. how kin relations determine the interactions between
individuals, and groups of individuals, in a certain culture. Kroeber (1909), a distinguished
anthropologist, however, was of the opinion that kinship terminologies were primarily a
linguistic phenomenon, which should be analysed by linguistic methods, and he seems to
have been the first one to look at kin terms from a linguistic point of view. His interest was
in the categories of meaning that underlie the relations expressed by kin terms in various
languages. He distinguished between eight underlying categories with relevance for kin
relations, and argued that kinship terminologies and the meaning of kin terms could be
analysed through these categories. His eight categories were: (1) difference in generation
between the anchor and referent, (2) age difference within a generation between the anchor
and referent, (3) sex of referent, (4) sex of speaker, (5) sex of connecting relative (e.g.
female for maternal grandfather), (6) condition of connecting relative (e.g. living or dead),
(7) consanguineal versus affinal kinship, and (8) collateral versus lineal kinship.4
Kroeber's (1909) article was an early precursor of a discipline that would develop later,
namely that of componential analysis (Lounsbury, 1956; Goodenough, 1956; Wallace/Atkins, 1960; Romney/d'Andrade, 1964). Componential analysis is the semantic study
of kin terms (and also other areas of the vocabulary of a language) by which meaning is
analysed in terms of atomic components in such a way that, for every term, different values
are given to a group of semantic features (also known as dimensions). Semantic features
thus correspond to what Kroeber (1909) call categories. Both anthropologists and linguists
have been concerned with kin terms and componential analysis, and as for linguistics, this
is probably the field of study where kin terms and kinship have received the most thorough
treatment. Among more recent work on componential analysis and kin terms,
Pericliev/Valdes-Perez (1998) can be mentioned. The authors present a computer program
designed to find the simplest componential analysis, with a minimal number of semantic
features, for any given kinship terminology.
4
In some instances, Kroeber's (1909) terminology have been altered as to conform to the terminology used
here.
8
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
Other papers dealing, in part or wholly, with kin term semantics, though not within the
frame work of componential analysis are Hale (1982), Laughren (1982) and Merlan/Heath
(1982) – all in a collection (Heath/Merlan/Rumsey, 1982) on linguistic aspects of kinship in
Australian aboriginal languages.
3.3. Markedness theory applied to kin terms and kinship
terminologies
Some studies of kin terms and kinship terminologies have also been carried out within
markedness theory.
Greenberg (1966) presents evidence for the existence of markedness hierarchies among
kin terms. As in other markedness hierarchies, kin term hierarchies of markedness may be
determined by various criteria, such as structure (the marked category often has overt
phonetic expression where the unmarked category is indicated by zero), defective
paradigms (the unmarked category tends to have more distinctions than the marked
category, e.g. a distinction between male and female, making the marked category defective
in the paradigm), and frequency (the unmarked category occurs more frequently than the
marked one). Using these criteria on kin terms from about 120 languages,5 Greenberg
(1966) finds a number of universal hierarchies among kin terms, of which the following are
examples (with illustrations in English):
• Consanguineal kin terms are unmarked as against affinal kin terms (e.g. fatherin-law has phonetic expression where father has none).
• Ascending kin terms are unmarked as against descending kin terms of equal
genealogical distance from the anchor (e.g. mother is normally more frequent in
texts than daughter).
• Lineal kin terms are unmarked as against collateral kin terms (e.g. cousin lacks
a distinction in gender while all English lineal kin terms have such a distinction).
• Kin terms denoting kin types of generations more remote from the anchor are
marked as against kin terms denoting kin types of generations less remote from
the anchor (e.g. grandfather has phonetic expression where father has none).
In another article Greenberg (1980) emphasises the relevance of markedness theory and
language universals in explaining the design of kinship terminologies in different languages.
Nerlove/Romney (1967) investigate sibling terminologies cross-linguistically, and find
that out of 4140 logically possible ways to assign kin terms to the eight kin types older or
younger brother or sister of male or female (with one and the same term for all of them as
one extreme and eight different terms as the other extreme) only 12 account for as many as
87% (214/245) of the terminologies in their sample. These 12 ways of assigning sibling kin
5
Greenberg (1966) did not use a formal sample of languages for this study, but used as a basic set the terminologies of about 80 California Indian groups, supplemented by a further 40 or so terminologies from other
parts of the world.
9
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
terms are illustrated in table 1 below, where kin terms are symbolised by capital letters
followed by a specification of the kin type they include.
Table 1: Common ways of assigning kin terms to sibling types crosslinguistically
—————————————————————————————————
DIVISION OF SIBLING TERMS
NUMBER
A: sibling
14
A: brother B: sister
21
A: elder brother B: younger brother C: sister
3
A: elder sibling B: younger sibling
21
A: elder brother B: elder sister C: younger sibling
38
A: elder brother B: younger brother C: elder sister D: younger sister
78
A: parallel sibling B: cross sibling
6
A: parallel sibling B: cross brother C: cross sister
6
A: cross sibling B: parallel brother C: parallel sister
6
A: parallel brother B: parallel sister C: cross brother D: cross sister
5
A: elder parallel sibling B: younger parallel sibling C: cross sibling
9
A: elder parallel sibling B: younger parallel sibling C: cross brother D: cross sister
7
Total
214
—————————————————————————————————
(Derived from figure 1 and table 2 in Nerlove/Romney (1967:182-183))
Nerlove/Romney (1967) argue that the 12 ways of assigning sibling terms illustrated in the
table above are a priori more likely to occur than any other ways of assigning such terms.
They base their arguments on certain anthropological assumptions and factors relating to
cognitive economy.
3.4. Cross-linguistic phonetic similarities between parental kin
terms
The tendency for different languages separated both genetically and areally to develop
phonetically similar words for mother and father on the basis of nursery forms (i.e. forms
used by, and in conversation with, children) has been noticed in many studies of child
language. Lewis (1951), for instance, claims that the mother is usually named with an "mform" and the father with a "p-, b-, t- or d-form". This tendency was investigated
statistically by Murdock (1959) in a study that shows that cross-linguistically the words for
mother tend to involve nasal bilabials or nasal dentals, typically [m] or [n], combined with
low vowels, typically [a] or [!], while the words for father tend to involve non-nasal dentals
or bilabials, [p], [b], [f], [t], [d], etc, combined with low vowels. Specifically, out of the 210
terms for mother in his sample that combined any bilabials or dentals with low vowels in
the first syllable of their root, 170 – i.e. 81% – were nasals, and out of the 306 terms for
father that combined any bilabials or dentals with low vowels in the first syllable of their
root, 257 – i.e. 84% – were non-nasals.
10
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
Murdock's (1959) results are analysed and commented by Jakobson (1962) who argues
that the earliest meaningful units emerging in infant speech are based on the polarity
between the maximal energy output of low vowels and the maximal reduction in energy
output caused by consonants formed with complete oral closure, i.e. stops and nasals. Since
the most important entities in the infants world are its mother and father, it will apply its
first meaningful words to them. The Proto-Indo-European *ma"te"r, 'mother', and *p$te"r,
'father', are presumed to have developed this way from ma"- and p$- combined with the
suffix -te"r, used for various kin terms.
Jakobson (1962) explains the fact that nasals dominate in the terms for mother by
referring to breast feeding: "Often the sucking activities of a child are accompanied by a
slight nasal murmur [...] Later this phonatory reaction to nursing is reproduced as an
anticipatory signal at the mere sight of food and finally as a manifestation of a desire to eat,
or more generally, as an expression of discontent and impatient longing for missing food or
absent nurser, and any ungranted wish" (Jakobson, 1962:542). Since the infant's longings
are normally addressed to its mother initially, these nasal interjections will gradually turn
into a kin term meaning 'mother'. Parental kin terms developed from nursery words are
sometimes taken up in the inventory of kin terms and frequently coexist with other
established terms, which in turn may also have originally developed from nursery terms but
undergone phonetic and morphological change. This may have been the case in French
where the forms maman, 'mom', and papa, 'dad', coexist with the older forms mère,
'mother', and père, 'father'. Other sources from which kin terms are renewed are slang
forms, terms of endearment (often diminutives), and loans from other languages. Examples
of the last mentioned case are found in the Germanic and Slavic languages where the terms
for mother and father have been loaned from French and coexist with older form; thus
English mama/mom and mother, and papa/pa and father.
3.5. Speech act studies of kin terms
Kin terms have also been dealt with in studies on communication and speech acts within the
interdisciplinary fields of pragmatics and sociolinguistics.
Perhaps one of the first studies in this area is a paper by Stanner (1937) dedicated to the
qustion of how different linguistic forms – like kin terms, personal names, nick names,
signs, etc – can be used for addressing and referring to persons among Australian
aboriginies in his area of field work (which was northwestern Northern Territory,
Australia). Another similar study was carried out by Chao (1956), who investigated kinship
terms, titles, proper names, and pronouns as means of address in Chinese.
The collection of articles on Australian aboriginal languages edited by Heath/Merlan/Rumsey (1982) also includes some studies on pragmatics and the social functions of kin
terms in conversation, e.g. Merlan (1982), Rumsey (1982) and Sutton (1982).
Other relatively recent investigations include Mufwene (1988), who studies the honorific
and endearing usage of kin terms for both kin and non-kin in Kituba (a creole spoken in
Zaire, Africa), Wu (1990), who investigates patterns of vocative kin term usage for non-kin
in Chinese and the restrictions of such usage, and Choi (1997), who writes about the use of
kin terms instead of personal pronouns (between kinsmen as well as non-kin) in Korean and
Bulgarian.
11
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
3.6. Kin terms in historical linguistics
Kin terms have also been used in historical linguistics, where cognate kin terms in related
languages are often compared with each other to help establishing genetic patterns between
languages and groups of languages. While kin terms are dealt with in many works on IndoEuropean historical linguistics (as well as in some historically oriented linguistic works on
other language families), Marck's (1996a) paper about kin terms in the Polynesian protolanguages can be mentioned here as an interesting contribution within this field with
regards to Polynesian languages. He proposes a modified genetic classification of the
Polynesian languages (challenging Pawley's (1966a) traditionally used classification) on the
grounds of differences and similarities between Polynesian kin term cognates. With regards
to Polynesian historical linguistics and kin terms, Wilson's (1982) study on ProtoPolynesian possessive marking is also worth mentioning, since he devotes some sections to
the discussion of Polynesian kin terms from an historical perspective.
3.7. Grammatical properties of kin terms
With few exceptions, the grammatical properties of kin terms have been only briefly
touched upon in the literature, either as supplementary information in anthropological or
pragmatic/semantic studies on kin terms, or in linguistic studies on possession where kin
terms are mentioned as a group of NPs that, when expressing the possessee, show up in
inalienable possessive constructions in many languages, i.e. constructions which are
commonly described as involving an inherent or natural bond between the possessor and the
possessee, as opposed to alienable possessive constructions where no such bond exists (see
further chapter 7). Some of the investigations that do focus on grammatical aspects of kin
terms and the influence of kinship on grammatical systems will be presented below.
Some studies – e.g. Hale (1966), Schebeck (1973), Hercus/White (1973), Alpher (1982)
and Koch (1982) – have drawn attention to the intricate pronominal systems of some
Australian aboriginal languages, which encode certain kinship-related information. A
feature often present in (some or all of) the dual and plural personal pronouns of these
languages is whether all the referents of the pronoun in question are included in the same
set of alternate generations or if any of the referents are included in a different set of
alternate generations. People included in the same set of alternate generations either belong
to the same generation, like cousins, or to two (or more) different generations separated by
an even number of generations, like a grandparent and his or her grandchild. People
included in different sets of alternate generations belong to two (or more) different
generations separated by an odd number of generations, like a mother and daughter, or a
great-grandparent and his or her great-grandchild. If this system is carried out consistently,
as, for instance, in the Australian language Dalabon, spoken in Northern Territory, Australia
(Alpher, 1982), dual and plural pronouns will have two forms throughout the pronominal
system, the choice between which depends on the relative alternate generations of the
referents included in the pronominal form in question. Some languages also include in
(some or all of) their dual and plural pronominal forms information on whether all the
12
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
referents are members of the same patri- or matriline or if any of them are included in a
different line, and thus extend the number of pronominal forms further. Examples of such
languages are Lower Aranda, spoken in Northern Territory (Hale, 1966), and Kaytej also
spoken in Northern Territory (Koch, 1982). A somewhat different variant of a pronominal
system encoding kinship information is found in Adnjamathanha, a language spoken in
South Australia (Schebeck, 1973; Hercus/White, 1973), where there are ten series of
personal pronouns, the use of which depends on the kinship relations both between the
speaker and the referent(s), and between the referents internally.
Another interesting study focusing on kinship in grammar is a study by Evans
(forthcoming) that treats a special set of kin terms used as verbs in some Australian
aboriginal and American Indian languages. These verbs have the meaning 'be K to', 'have as
K', 'call a K', or 'consider as a K' (where K represents the kin type expressed by a particular
kin term). He gives a thorough presentation of how such kin verbs work in the closely
related Australian languages Ilgar and Iwaidja spoken in Northern Territory, and goes on to
make a comparison with the usage of kin verbs in some American Indian languages of the
Iroquoian family, spoken in western USA and Canada, the Yuman subfamily, spoken in
Mexico and south western USA, and the Uto-Aztecan family, spoken in south western USA
and Central America, as well as with a few Australian languages of Northern Territory of
the Gunwinyuguan family. He also compares kin verbs with other verbs and finds that they
share different grammatical properties, such as availability for tense/aspect/mode-marking
(TAM) and subject/object-affixation etc, to varying degrees in the different languages under
consideration.
It is interesting to see that in most of the languages in this study both kin verbs and kin
nouns may have both a referential and a predicative use. Verbs (with affixes for subject and
object) may have a referential use through the means of headless relative clauses; for
instance, roughly like English [the one such that] she mothers me. Evans (forthcoming)
finds five basic factors governing the choice between kin verbs and kin nouns in expressing
kin relations. These are reviewed below (in a different order than in Evans' paper).
(i) PERSON VALUE: Certain person combinations between the anchor and the
referent trigger the use of either kin nouns or kin verbs in some languages, so that
verbal constructions are used or preferred with one set of combinations, while
nominal constructions are used or preferred with others. In Central Guerrero
Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan), for instance, a verb-like construction is normally used
when an anchor in the first or second person or the third person definite is
combined with a referent in the first or second person. A nominal construction is
used in all other cases.
(ii) ADDRESS VS REFERENCE: It seems that kin verbs used referentially are not
completely equivalent to NPs since they do not, in general, also have a vocative
use. Nouns, being morphologically simpler, are usually preferred over verbs in
address.6
6
One exception, however, is Cayuga, an Iroquoian language, in which the terms for mother and father are
verbs (prefixed with a subject marker), while still being used as address terms (as well as terms of reference)
(Sasse, 1998 [quoted in Evans, forthcoming]). See further section 10.2.
13
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(iii) KIN TYPE: Kin verbs do not usually cover all the kin types denoted by
nominal terms in a language with kin verbs. The kin type one wants to designate,
then, may obviously be a deciding factor in the choice between nominal and
verbal kin terms.
(iv) ACTUAL VS CLASSIFICATORY KIN: Languages that classify everyone in the
known social universe with different kin terms according to various criteria (like
many Australian languages do) seem to use verbs (if they employ kin verbs) rather
than nouns to emphasise actual kin rather than classificatory kin.
(v) EXTRA SEMANTICS: Either kin term nouns or kin term verbs may carry
semantic information in addition to the information that simply describes a
kinship relation. In Huichol (Uto-Aztecan), for instance, a predication involving a
kin term noun carries the meaning 'be K', while a predication involving a kin term
verb has the meaning 'consider as K' or 'look upon as K'. The use of kin verbs in
Huichol, then, indicates that the social context in a certain situation provides
reasons for equating with kinship a certain relation which is perhaps not (or not
yet) a kinship relation.
Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming) is perhaps the first attempt to make a
systematic treatment of the general grammatical properties of kin terms. The authors'
concern, however, is solely on kin terms as nouns. They go through a number of
grammatical properties that in many languages set kin terms apart from other nouns. They
note that kin terms are not usually, and in some languages cannot be, combined with
definite articles or other determiners. This often leads to a bare noun use of kin terms,
similar to the use of proper names in many languages. Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm
present further similarities between kin terms and proper names. These include (i) their
plural formation; both kin terms and proper names often either lack a plural or have the
same special plural markers, (ii) their use as possessors in possessive constructions; both
kin terms and proper names sometimes make use of the same special possessive marker, or
as possessors occupy the same position in syntax different from that of other possessor
nouns, and (iii) their use with proprial articles (i.e. markers used in some languages
primarily with proper names); the use of these may often include both proper names and kin
terms.7 These properties shared between proper names and kin terms may arise in different
ways. With proprial articles, kin terms and proper names form the core of lexemes for
which the article is targeted, whereas with definite articles, kin terms and proper names
usually seem to be some of the last nouns to be affected by a grammaticalization process
extending the use of definite articles.
Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm also discuss some properties of kin terms as possessees,
i.e. heads of possessive constructions. As already mentioned, kin terms as possessees are
commonly used in inalienable possessive constructions cross-linguistically. Dahl and
Koptjevskaja-Tamm argue that the split between alienable and inalienable possessive
7
One of the examples of proprial articles presented by Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming) is taken from
a northern Swedish dialect where the article n is used with both proper names and kin terms: n Per, PROPER
NAME, n far, 'father'. We might add here that some northern Swedish dialects also have a distinction between a
masculine proprial article n and a feminine one a; examples of the latter being a Kerstin, PROPER NAME, a
mor, 'mother'.
14
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
constructions may be "the result of a grammaticalization process by which a younger and
expanding possessive construction is encroaching on the territory of an older one", often
leaving kin terms, especially those frequently used, as one of the last lexical domains
affected by the process.8 Thus, in a particular language, the new construction will be an
alienable construction while the old one will be an inalienable construction. In the final
stages of such a grammaticalization process there may be a split among the kin terms so
that some frequently used terms evoke (older) inalienable constructions while other kin
terms evoke (younger) alienable constructions.
Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm also argue that a kin term is more likely to appear in an
inalienable possessive construction, and also to be used as a proper-name-like bare noun,
under certain conditions, viz. (A) if it denotes an ascending relation (father rather than son),
or (B) if it has a unique referent within a family (father rather than uncle), or (C) if the distance between anchor and referent is no more than one generation (father rather than grandfather). These conditions make up what they call the 'parental prototype', shaping the
contour of grammatical properties with kin terms in the world's languages. It is interesting
to note that the conditions of Dahl's and Koptjevskaja-Tamm's parental prototype all correspond (wholly or partially) to kin term markedness hierarchies suggested by Greenberg
(1966); namely the following: an ascending kin term is unmarked as against a descending
kin term of equal genealogical distance from the anchor (corresponding to condition A); a
kin term denoting lineal kinship is unmarked as against one denoting collateral kinship
(corresponding to condition B); and a kin term denoting a kin type of a generation more
remote from the anchor is marked as against a kin term denoting a kin type of a generation
less remote from the anchor (corresponding to condition C).
8
This point is also discussed (and in more detail) in Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (1998).
15
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
4. THE SAMOAN LANGUAGE
This chapter aims at presenting some aspects of the Samoan language which are relevant for
the study. In the first section, I will make a brief sketch of Samoan grammar in general, and
in the second section I will introduce the Samoan kin terms to be treated in the following
chapters and outline the principles of the Samoan kinship system.
4.1. Some notes on Samoan grammar
The basic word order of Samoan transitive main clauses is VSO, even though variants
occur (mainly SVO). Modifiers in both NPs and VPs are generally placed after their head.
The language has a largely isolating morphology with only a limited number of bound
morphemes. Verbs are preceded by a particle indicating tense, aspect and mode (a TAMparticle), and nouns are generally preceded by an article indicating number and specificity9
of the NP. The core TAM-particles are listed in table 2 below.
Table 2: Samoan TAM-particles
e (allomorph: te)
sa"
na
'ua
'o lo'o
'ole'a"
unspecified tense
imperfective past
perfective past
inchoative perfect
progressive present
future tense
As for the NP articles, there is no article indicating specific plural reference – it is rather the
absence of an article with a particular noun that gives it specific and plural reference. The
system is outlined in table 3 below.
Table 3: Samoan articles for number and specificity
specific
non-specific
singular
le
se
plural
Ø
ni
Functional markers indicate the syntactic function of the NP and/or the spatial orientation of
its referent, and precede the article for number and specificity. Samoan is a morphologically
ergative language and the functional marker e indicates ergative case (subjects of transitive
clauses), while the absence of a functional marker indicates absolutive case (subjects of
9
Samoan does not make a distinction between definite and indefinite NPs, but between specific and nonspecific NPs. The specific article indicates that the NP refers to a particular entity, regardless of whether it is
definite or indefinite (i.e. expected to be known or not by the addressee). A non-specific article indicates that
the NP refers to any member of the conceptual category denoted by the head of the NP. Non-specific NPs are
often used in negations and questions where the existence of the NP referent is either denied or not certified.
Non-specific NPs may also sometimes indicate politeness and humility (Mosel/Hovdhaugen, 1992).
16
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
intransitive clauses and direct objects). The marker 'o indicates the so called presentative
case, and normally occurs with NPs which constitute a single utterance, NPs occurring
clause initially, and predicative NPs. Since e and 'o normally mark core arguments of the
clause, I refer to them by the term 'case markers' in this study, while I refer to other
functional markers, like i, 'in/at', 'i, 'to', and mai, 'from', by the term 'prepositions'.10
Examples (2)-(5) below represent typical Samoan clauses illustrating the use of functional
markers, NP articles and TAM-particles, as well as Samoan word order.
(2)
na
sasa e
PAST.PT
hit
le
ERG the
11
teine
le
maile
girl
the
dog
'The girl hit the dog'
(3)
sa"
ta'o'oto
Ø
toea'i'ina
i
le
fale
PAST.IM
rest.PL
SPEC.PL
old.man.PL
in
the
house
'The old men were resting in the house'
(4)
'o
le
faia"'oga
le
tama"loa
lea
PR
the
teacher
the
man
this
'This man is a teacher'
(5)
'o
le
tama la'itiiti 'ua
PR the boy
young
INCH
alu
fa'a-
-topetope 'i
le
fale
'oloa
go
CAUS
-hurry
the
house
goods
to
'It was the young boy who went to the shop in hurry'
Personal pronouns occur in two different sets; independent and preverbal. The preverbal set
may be used only for personal pronouns functioning as transitive or intransitive subjects.
They always lack functional markers and occur before the verb of the clause. The
independent set may be used for personal pronouns in any syntactic function (including
transitive and intransitive subjects). They may be combined with any functional marker and
normally occur after the verb of the clause. (6) and (7) below provide examples.
(6)
sa"
'ou
fafagaina Ø
pua'a
PAST.IM
1.SG
feed
pig
SPEC.PL
PREVERBAL
'I fed the pigs'
(7)
sa"
sau le
leoleo
'ia"
a'u
PAST.IM
come the
police
to
1.SG
INDEPENDENT
'The policeman came to me'
The bound morphemes that do exist in Samoan include both prefixes and suffixes, like the
causative fa'a- (prefixed to nouns and intransitive verbs), the classifier denoting human
10
Whether or not a distinction between case markers and prepositions is grammatically motivated for Samoan
is a question which may be discussed further. However, such a discussion falls outside the scope of this paper.
11
For convenience, I have usually glossed the Samoan specific article le as 'the', the English definite article, in
the examples, even if their use and meaning are slightly different (see footnote 9).
17
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
beings to'a- (usually prefixed to numerals), the nominalizing -ga (suffixed to verbs), and
the augmentative -Cia (consonant plus -ia) (normally suffixed to verbs).12 Two other
morphological processes present in Samoan are reduplication (total or partial) and vowel
lengthening. These have various functions, but both are primarily used to indicate plural
reference and plural agreement with a restricted number of nouns and verbs (cf. example (3)
above). Possessive pronouns (standard set) are made up of a specific article, a possessive
marker and a personal pronoun. For the singular pronouns, all these elements are fusioned
together into one word, while for the dual and plural pronouns, only the article and the
possessive marker are fusioned together. This is illustrated by (8) below.
(8) (a) lthe
-o-
-'u
-POSS
-1.SG
(b) l-
-o
the -POSS
'my'
ta"tou
1.PL.IN
'our'
These possessive pronouns are used attributively preceding the head of the NP (the
possessee).
4.2. Samoan kin terms
Samoan has a rather small set of simple kin terms. With only a few exceptions, they designate
the members of the nuclear family. For most other relatives, analytic circumlocutions are used
like 'o le tama" o lo'u tina", meaning 'maternal grandfather' (lit. 'the father of my mother').
The simple kin terms that designate other relatives than those in the nuclear family are
usually collective terms, like 'a"iga, '(extended) family', and gafa, 'group of consanguineal
kin'. These terms are normally used in the singular but refer to a group of individuals.
There seems to have been in the past, however, a richer kin term system with simple kin
terms for a greater number of kin types in Samoan. This is reflected by older kin terms
seldomly used, like ila"mutu, 'sister of any male lineal ancestor of a male anchor, connected
to him via male ties only', tamafafine, 'descendant of a male's sister (the male or any of his
descendants being the anchor)', tamata"ne, 'descendant of a female's brother (the female or
any of her descendants being the anchor)', and feagaiga, 'reciprocal term between
tamafafine and tamata"ne or between a brother and sister'.13 To the extent that they are still
used, these older terms are in present day Samoan more associated with special social duties
than with the kin relation itself.
Samoan also has a set of polite kin terms, like tua'a", 'parent', and alo, 'off-spring', which
are used of persons of high social rank (or of relatives of such persons) or on formal
12
The function of Samoan -Cia has been vividly discussed in both the Polynesian and general linguistic literature. For an analysis of this morpheme as an augmentative suffix (adding a certain depth manifested in various
ways to the action described by the verb to which it is suffixed), see Jonsson (1997).
13
The terms tamafafine and tamata" ne may be considered to be analytic kin circumlocutions rather than simple
kin terms since they may be translated literally as 'woman-child' and 'man-child' respectively, and thus link a
person (the anchor) to a kinsman (the child) via another kinsman (the woman or man). But since juxtaposition
is not the normal way of creating genitive expressions in Samoan, we may also think of these terms as simple
kin terms (cf. the discussion in section 2.5 above). I will leave it up to the reader to make the preferred
classification.
18
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
occasions. Some of these seem to be quite commonly used (like the ones just mentioned)
while others are hardly used at all and are not even known by all Samoans.
Table 4 presents the most common simple kin terms used in present day Samoan.14
(Some of the translations in the table are somewhat simplified, as will be obvious from the
discussion below.)
Table 4: Samoan kin terms
INDIVIDUAL
KIN TERMS
SEX OF REFERENT
Gene-
SEX OF
affinity ANCHOR
ration,
+1 C
0C
either
male
female
male
–1 C
female
both
male
female
tama" father
papa dad
uso sibling of same
tina" mother
mama mom
tuafafine sister of
sex as anchor
tuagane brother of
female
atali'i son of male
male
uso sibling of same
sex as anchor
afafine daughter of
male
tamateine daughter
of female
tamateine daughter
of couple
tamatama son of
female
tamatama son of
couple
either
matua parent
tama off-spring of female
tama off-spring of couple
tei consanguineal collateral
C
relative of the same generation
as anchor or a descending
generation (the term can also be
used reciprocally between all
collateral relatives as long as the
referent is under the age of
about thirty or so)
either
a"va" wife
male
A
female
ta" ne husband
to'alua spouse
either
COLLECTIVE
C
either
A
either
KIN TERMS
'a"iga family (nuclear or extended depending on the context)
fa"nau off-spring (collective reference only)
tupu'aga ancestors (usually collective reference)
tupuga ancestors (usually collective reference)
gafa consanguineal relatives (usually collective reference)
paolo consanguineal relatives (usually collective reference)
+1 = one generation above anchor, –1 = one generation below anchor, 0 = same generation as anchor
C = consanguineal terms, A = affinal terms
14
See Appendix A for a more detailed list of Samoan kin terms.
19
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
Two of the kin terms in the table also have special plural forms – ma"tua, 'parents', and
tuafa"fine, 'sisters of male' – both formed by vowel lengthening. As for the parental kin
terms, the set mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad', are used primarily by children or by adults
speaking to or in the presence of children. These are probably fairly recent loan words from
Indo-European languages (French via English). We may also note that the standard terms in
Samoan for mother and father, tina" and tama" respectively, do not conform to the
predominant pattern in the world's languages in which words for mother tend to involve
nasal consonants and words for father tend to involve non-nasal dentals or bilabials
(Murdock (1959); see section 3.4 above).
The Samoan kinship terminology is of the Hawaiian type, which means that siblings and
cousins may be referred to by the same kin terms, e.g. the term tuafafine may refer to the
sister of a male anchor, as well as the female cousin of a male anchor. Sometimes, but perhaps not as often, also the use of the terms for sons and daughters may be extended to include grandsons, granddaughters, nephews and nieces, and the terms for mother and father
may be extended to include grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles; especially if the
anchor in question lives in close contact with the referents. Also the present day meaning of
the term tei seems to have sprung from a widening of a more narrow meaning, since it is a
reflex of the Proto-Polynesian term *teina (or *taina), 'younger sibling of same sex as anchor' (Wilson, 1982). As can be seen from table 4, tei is used today for all consanguineal
collateral relatives of the same generation as anchor or a descending generation, i.e. it may
be used for brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, cousin's off-spring, sibling's grandchildren, etc. But this wider meaning of tei is more firmly encoded than the wider meaning
of the terms for the nuclear family discussed above. This can be seen from the fact that it is
possible to refer to a brother by the term tuagane moni, 'true brother (of a female)', but not
to a cousin, whereas it does not make sense to separate siblings from other collaterals by
using the term tei moni, 'true tei', of only the former. In other words, while we can discern a
core meaning of tuagane as 'brother of a female', we cannot find a similar core meaning of
tei as 'younger sibling of same sex as anchor' or even as 'sibling' in present day Samoan.
We may also for a while direct our attention to the Samoan terms for brother, sister, son
and daughter. As indicated in table 4, these terms vary depending on the sex of the anchor
in question. Such distinctions are not uncommon in the world's languages (Schusky, 1983).
Even in English – normally considered not to make these distinctions – one finds a near
parallel case to the Samoan situation: while a girl may refer to her father by the term daddy,
a boy would hardly think of using the term for his father, instead preferring the term dad. In
the anthropological literature, the term 'speaker' is often used instead of 'anchor' (or some
equivalent term) in translations of the Samoan terms for brother, sister, son and daughter
(e.g. in Mead (1969 [1930]) and Murdock (1970)), so that translations like 'K – male
speaker' or 'K – female speaker' are given. This is misleading. In actual fact, the sex of the
speaker is of no relevance for which kin term is chosen in these cases in Samoan. A boy as
well as a girl may say something like lona tuagane, 'her brother'. The sex of the anchor,
however, is crucial. In the phrase above, the anchor is female; had it been male, the phrase
lona uso, 'his brother', would have been chosen in the same case. Quite obviously, the
deciding factor for the choice of the relevant kin terms in Samoan is the sex of the anchor,
and not the sex of the speaker.
20
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
There is a small number of Samoan words which may be included in the category of
improper kin terms. They have an established use as kin terms along side with other equally
established uses, and primarily include the terms in table 5 below.
Table 5: Samoan improper kin terms
——————————————————————————————————
tama
'off-spring of female (or couple)' used as a kin term; otherwise 'child' (not in
the sense of off-spring) or 'boy'
fa"nau 'off-spring' (collective reference only) used as a kin term; otherwise 'birth',
'give birth' or 'be born'
matua 'parent' used as a kin term; otherwise 'old' or 'be old'
to'alua 'spouse' used as a kin term; otherwise 'be two' (used about people)
——————————————————————————————————
A few terms have a history as improper kin terms, or are derived from improper kin terms,
but do not have a use outside the kinship system in present day Samoan, and could thus be
thought of as proper kin terms. I will refer to them as semi-proper kin terms, however, since
their grammatical properties are sometimes different from those of the "fully" proper kin
terms. The semi-proper kin terms are presented in table 6.
Table 6: Samoan semi-proper kin terms (derived from, or with a history as, improper kin terms)
————————————————————————————————————
tamatama 'son of a female (or couple)'; derived from tama, 'child', and tama, 'boy'
tamateine 'daughter of a female (or couple)'; derived from tama, 'child', and teine, 'girl'
ta"ne
'husband'; historically the word for '(married) man' or 'male'
————————————————————————————————————
Also, some terms may be used affectionately or jokingly in reference to kinsmen but are
normally used outside the kinship system. They are terms like lo'omatua, 'aged woman',
which may be used for a mother or grandmother, or jokingly for a wife, and toea'ina, 'aged
man', which may be used for a father or grandfather, or jokingly for a husband. Since these
terms, however, tend to be used non-relationally, even when referring to kinsmen (quite
differently form the English term old man for instance), I have not regarded them as kin
terms at all in this paper.
Finally, something may be said about adopted, step and affinal kin ties. Generally,
adopted and step relatives are equated with consanguineal relatives and have no special
terms. Some kin terms, however, basically the ones designating members of the nuclear
family, may optionally be modified with fai to explicitly indicate adoptive ties, like atali'i
fai, 'adopted son (of male)'. As for affinal relatives, they do not receive special terms (apart
from the collective term paolo, 'affinal relatives', and, naturally, the terms for spouse). The
consanguineal terms designating members of the nuclear family are also used for affinal
relatives. Technically, it is possible to add the phase i le tula"fono, lit. 'in-law', to these terms
to indicate affinal ties, but such terms are hardly ever used, and are apparently direct
translation loans from English.
21
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
5. SOURCES OF DATA AND METHOD OF ANALYSIS
In this chapter some facts about the data corpus are presented; and the method of analysis is
discussed together with some methodological issues in connection with the analysing
procedure.
5.1. The data
The Samoan text corpus I have been working with have been assembled in different ways.
Most of the texts were supplied, in form of letters and recordings which I transcribed into
written text, by my informant, Aiga Jonsson, a native speaker of Samoan from Western
Samoa, presently resident in Sweden. Another native speaker of Samoan resident in Sweden, Va'ai Andersson, also supplied one recorded text. Other texts were taken from official
Samoan internet pages, and Polynesian internet forums where the communication is conducted partly in Samoan.15
In total, the corpus consists of about 19i000 words, out of which 590 are kin terms (430
proper kin terms, 34 semi-proper kin terms, and 126 kin term uses of improper ones).
Nearly one third of the text corpus is made up of genealogical information. This portion of
the data naturally contains most of the total number of kin terms (463 tokens). The corpus
can be devided into six genres, which are listed in table 7 below together with the relative
and absolute size of each genre (measured by number of words).
Table 7: The genres of the data corpus:
GENRE
WORDS
PERCENTAGE
Genealogical information
Narrative
Internet forum conversations
Personal letters
Song lyrics
Informative web-pages
TOTAL
05573
00883
00565
07410
03589
01020
19040
029.3%
004.6%
003.0%
038.9%
018.8%
005.4%
100.0%
SOURCE
informant, internet
informant
internet
informant
internet, informant
internet
Samoan kin terms are basically of two word classes; nouns and verbs. Kin term nouns
are kin terms that are combined with NP determiners, such as articles denoting specificity
and number, demonstrative pronouns or possessive pronouns, or those without any
determiners (see section 6.3 and chapter 11). Kin term verbs are kin terms that are
combined with TAM-particles. These are homonymous with the corresponding kin term
nouns but may have meanings like 'be brother', etc (see further chapter 10). The
15
A detailed list of sources for the text corpus is found in Appendix D. Every source has received a number,
and this number is given as a reference whenever language examples taken from the text corpus are presented
in this paper. Samoan examples without source indications were supplied by my informant in conversation.
22
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
overwhelming majority of the kin terms in the text corpus are nouns, 585 tokens as against
5 tokens of kin term verbs. Of all the 590 occurrences of kin terms in the corpus, 587 are
tokens of the common kin terms presented in table 4 above (section 4.2), while only 3 are
polite versions of kin terms.
If we divide the kin terms in the text corpus into individual and collective kin terms, we
find that the former number 450 and the latter 140. The ten most frequently used individual
kin terms in the corpus are presented in table 8 below.16
Table 8: Top-ten of Samoan kin terms
PERCENT OF
KIN TERM
NUMBER
INDIVIDUAL
KIN TERMS
tina"
uso
tama"
matua
tuagane
to'alua
ta"ne
atali'i
tei
tuafafine
'mother'
'same-sex-sibling'
'father'
'parent'
'brother of female'
'spouse'
'husband'
'son of male'
'(younger) collateral relative'
'sister of male'
84
74
63
57
32
20
15
15
15
13
18.7
16.4
14.0
12.7
17.1
14.4
13.3
13.3
13.3
12.9
We may note the dominant position of the parental kin terms tina", tama", and matua, which
together with the other less frequent parental kin terms mama and papa (child language),
and tua'a", 'parent' (polite), make up 48% of the total number of individual kin terms in the
text corpus (214 tokens out of 450). This pattern of a high relative frequency of parental kin
terms in discourse is probably common, if not universal, among the languages of the world.
Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming) find a similar pattern for Swedish kin terms, and
Greenberg (1966) presents data pointing in the same direction for English, Spanish, German
and Russian, and (though less clearly) for French. That the Samoan term uso, 'sibling of
same sex as anchor', is found so near the top of the list may be due to chance, but its high
frequency as compared to the other sibling terms, tuagane, 'brother of female', and
tuafafine, 'sister of male', is normal since uso has twice as many potential referents. The fact
that all genealogical texts were related by women may account for the relatively few
occurrences of tuafafine, 'sister of male'.
In addition to the text corpus, I have also received valuable information from my
informant in form of comments and answers to questions.
16
A table presenting frequency of use for the complete set of kin terms investigated is found in Appendix C.
23
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
5.2. Method of analysis
I have analysed all occurrences in my text corpus of Samoan kin terms17 that express actual
kinship relations. They were tagged with information on a number of linguistic domains
potentially relevant for the grammatical behaviour of kin terms. The domains, which will be
discussed in more detail below, are:
• proper, semi-proper or improper kin term
• person of anchor
• person of referent
• generation orientation
• semantics of usage
• syntactic function
• number and specificity
• bare noun, expanded nominal or neither
• possessee or possessor (if part of a possessive construction)
• possessive marker (if head of a possessive construction)
First of all, the kin terms were given a label 'proper', 'semi-proper' or 'improper'. As for
the improper kin terms, they were tagged and included in my analysis only when used as
kin terms. For instance, examples (9)-(12) below, taken from my text corpus, illustrate four
different uses of the improper kin term tama, 'off-spring' or 'child'. Of these, only the
occurrences of tama in examples (9) and (10) were considered in my analysis, since they, in
contrast to the occurrences of tama in examples (11) and (12), are used relationally as kin
terms.
(9)
['ou te]
manatua lava le
fa'asala maualuga a
1.SG UNS remember really the alto
high
of
le
tama
a Sala
the off-spring of NAME.FEM
'I really remember the high alto of Sala's child'
(tama = off-spring of female)
(Data, #20)
(10) 'ua
INCH
oti le
la"
tama
die the 3.DU off-spring
'Their child died'
(tama = off-spring of couple)
(Data, #4)
17
Some English kin terms have also come into use in Samoan – the following three in particular according to
my informant: cousin, sis (for sister) and bro (for brother) – which is reflected by one occurrence of the term
cousin in my text corpus. This term was discarded from my analysis, however, since English kin terms in
Samoan are not part of the topic in this paper.
24
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(11) sa"
vavae
PAST.IM
mai e
separate here
Ø
o'u ma"tua
ERG SPEC.PL my
'ua
na'o
se tama meamea 'o
but
INCH
only
a
newborn
ona ma"tua
parent.PL from at SPEC.PL her
'ae
child
mai i Ø
parent.PL
ia
PR 3.SG
'My parents adopted (her) from her parents but she was only a newborn child'
(tama = child, not in the sense of off-spring)
(Data, #2)
(12) 'o
PR
Elisapeta,
'o lo'o
nonofo ma
le
tama
Saina
i Peking
NAME.FEM
PROG
stay.PL
the
boy
chinese
in Peking
and
'Elisapeta and the Chinese boy live in Peking'
(tama = boy)
(Data, #1)
There were also four cases of metaphoric extension of proper kin terms of the type tama",
'father', in reference to the Christian god. These were excluded from the analysis.
Then the semantic person, i.e. first, second or third, of both anchor and referent of every
kin term was considered, as well as the generation orientation, i.e. ascending, descending or
horizontal. A particular problem related to the labelling of semantic person of the referents
had to do with collective kin terms, like 'a"iga, '(extended) family', and gafa, '(group of)
consanguineal kin', which may or may not be thought of as including the anchor within the
referent. In other words, in a phrase like lo ma"tou 'a"iga, 'our family', does the kin term have
a first person or third person referent semantically? This is the way these cases have been
treated in the corpus: If, according to my informant, the most natural way of paraphrasing a
first person anchored collective kin term (within its context), is with a first person plural
pronoun, i.e. if the referent is thought of as including the anchor, it has been assigned a first
person referent in the tagging of the text. Conversely, if a third person pronoun is a better
choice according to my informant, the term has been assigned a third person referent. The
same procedure, of course, has been used for second person anchored collective kin terms.
Third person anchored collective kin terms always have third person referents. This method
means that collective kin terms, like 'a"iga and gafa, will often have anchors and referents in
the same person.
A different, but related, case where the person of the kin term referent is not obvious
concerns the collective kin term fa"nau, 'off-spring', and is illustrated by example (13) below
from the text corpus.
(13) E
to'a-
UNS HUM
-fitu
le
fa"nau
a
-be.seven
the off-spring of
Ø
o'u
ma"tua
SPEC.PL
my
parent.PL
'My parents have seven children' or lit. 'The children of my parents are seven'
(Data, #2)
In consistence with the method employed above and the concept of semantic person, a first
person referent was assigned here, since 'the children of my parents', according to my
informant, is best paraphrased with 'we', in the way shown by (14).
25
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(14) 'O
PR
le
fa"nau
a
Ø
o'u
ma"tua,
e
to'a-
the
off-spring
of
SPEC.PL
my
parent.PL
UNS HUM
-fitu
'ima"tou
-be.seven
1.PL.EX
'The children of my parents, we are seven'
In my text corpus there were also 3 cases of kin terms with generic referents, and consequently generic anchors, like family in The family is always the best. These were considered to have third person anchors (i.e. anyone) and third person referents (i.e. anyone).
Also the semantics of the kin term usage, i.e. whether referential, vocative or predicative,
and the syntactic function of the kin terms were indicated. With regards to semantics of
usage, kin term nouns modifying other nouns, much like English family residence, have
been considered referential, and kin term nouns modifying verbs, somewhat similar to English make love, have been considered predicative. Together they numbered only 20 in my
text corpus. With regards to syntactic function, verbs of perception and emotion, like va'ai,
'see', 'look at', and alofa, 'love', are sometimes treated in the literature as transitive verbs (or
a subgroup of transitive verbs) in Samoan, like their English counterparts (as for instance in
Chung (1978)). I have treated them, however, as intransitive verbs on morphosyntactic
grounds (as does for instance Milner (1962) and Mosel/Hovdhaugen (1992)) since they
appear on par with intransitive verbs in Samoan with regards to case marking of their arguments. Consequently, when any of the arguments of these verbs are kin terms, they have
been labelled intransitive subject or oblique object rather than transitive subject or direct
object. Further, the number (singular or plural), specificity (specific or non-specific) and
bare noun status (bare noun, expanded nominal or neither) were indicated with the kin
terms in the text. And finally, if the kin term was part of a possessive construction (as was
most often the case; 87% (512/590) of the kin terms), information as to whether the kin
term was the possessor or the possessee was indicated with the term. Since Samoan has two
kinds of possessive markers (see further chapter 7), also which one of these was used was
indicated with every kin term that was head, i.e. possessee, of a possessive construction.
With the tagged text corpus as a base, frequency patterns and patterns of usage were
examined in order to find out if, and in that case how, kin terms differed from other nouns
and verbs in their grammatical properties.
26
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
6. SOME DIFFERENT USES OF KIN TERMS IN SAMOAN
In this chapter, we will first have a look at the referential, vocative and predicative uses of
Samoan kin terms, and what kind of constructions they may appear in. Then we will look at
the distribution of anchors and referents among kin terms with regards to semantic person.
The two last sections of the chapter will deal with bare noun uses of Samoan kin terms and
other cases of kin terms with implicit anchors.
6.1. Referential, vocative and predicative uses
In my Samoan text corpus, 89% of the kin terms were used referentially (524/590), 10%
predicatively (59/590), and 1% vocatively (7/590).
The majority of the referential kin terms are arguments of a predicate or complement of a
preposition (495 tokens). Among the remaining occurrences of referential kin terms we may
distinguish between three types. One type consists of what I have called introductory topics
(15 tokens). These are clause initial NPs which introduce the topic of the clause, but fall
outside its syntactic structure. Sometimes, the referent of an introductory topic is identical
to the referent of one of the core arguments of the clause, but this is not necessarily so (see
example (16) below). Another type consists of kin terms used as modifiers in NPs (8
tokens). A few referential kin terms are also single NPs, like those occurring in headlines
and unfinished sentences (6 tokens). (15)-(18) below are examples of the four types.
ARGUMENT OF VERB (referential):
(15) 'Ua
INCH
'ou
misia
lava
nai
o'u
1.SG
miss
really
EM.PL my
tei
(younger.)collateral.relative
'I really miss my little sisters and cousins'
(Data, #5)
INTRODUCTORY TOPIC (referential):
(16) 'O
PR
lo'u tina";
'o
lana
galuega e
my
PR
her
work
UNS be.usual SUBCL
mother
ma"sani ona
'o
le
lalagaina lea
o
Ø
ana 'ato
PR
the
weaving
of
SPEC.PL
her
this
fai
do
bag
'My mother; the work that (she) usually does is weaving bags'
(lit. 'My mother; her work that (she) usually does is this weaving of her bags')
(Data, #4)
MODIFIER TO NOUN (referential):
(18) 'ua
i'u
'ina
fa'aipoipo le 'au
INCH turn.out SUBCL marry
ali'i ia
the team man
ma
these with
'(It) turned out that these men got married with the sisters'
(Data, #7)
27
le
'au
uso
teine
the team sibling girl
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
SINGE NP (headline) (referential):
(17) 'O
PR
lo'u 'a"iga
my
family
'My family'
(Data, #2)
The low percentage in my text corpus of the vocative kin term uses is expected, both
because the corpus does not include any real time dialogue and because Samoan kin terms
are not generally used as terms of address. Proper names, nick names or special terms of
address like sole, 'lad', are preferred in their place. Mead (1969 [1930]) even go so far as to
claim that kin terms are never used vocatively at all in Samoan. However, there seem to be
a few circumstances in which Samoan kin terms may be used vocatively, namely, when
used (A) in the genre of song lyrics and poetry, (B) in child language (applies mainly – but
not exclusively – to the terms mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad'), and (C) in NPs with an
emotional possessive pronoun (which are pronouns that indicate endearment on the part of
the possessor towards the possessee) as determiner. Circumstances (A)-(C) do not of course
exclude each other. All 7 occurrences of vocative kin terms in my text corpus are cases of
(A), and one occurrence (in a children's song) is a case of both (A) and (B). The last
mentioned occurrence is given below as example (19).
CHILDREN'S TERM IN LYRICS OF SONG (vocative):
(19) Aue" mama
IJ
mom
e,
toe
sau
VOC again come
'Oh mom, come back'
(Data, #49)
According to my informant, cases of (C) as vocatives normally occur as opening lines of
letters, and it is not uncommon to start a letter with lines like those in examples (20) and
(21) below.
KIN TERMS WITH EMOTIONAL POSSESSIVE PRONOUNS (vocative):
(20) si
SPEC.EM.SG
o'u
tina"
my
mother
(21) si
SPEC.SG.EM
'My dear mother'
o'u
atali'i
my
son.of.male
'My dear son'
Vocative kin term NPs like those in these two examples may sometimes also be used in the
spoken language.
The predicative use of Samoan kin terms may involve predicative NPs, verbs or
modifiers to verbs. Predicative NPs are the most frequent of these; there are 42 tokens of
kin terms as heads of predicative NPs in my text corpus, 12 tokens of kin terms modifying
verbs, and 5 tokens of kin term verbs. Examples (22)-(24) below illustrate these three types
of predicative use.
28
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
HEAD OF PREDICATIVE NP (predicative):
(22) 'O Faiesea
PR NAME
'o
le
uso
lena" o lo'u tina"
PR the same.sex.sibling that
of my
mother
'Faiesea, that is the brother of my mother'
(Data, #3)
VERB (predicative):
(23) 'o
PR
a'u
fo'i
1.SG also
'ole'a"
tina"
i le
masina fou
FUT
be.mother
in the
month
next
'Also I will be a mother next month'
(Data, #4)
MODIFIER TO VERB (predicative):
(24) sa"
PAST.IM
nofo
ta"ne
i Falealupo
stay
huband
in VILLAGE
'(She) used to be married (and was staying with her husband's family) in Falealupo'
(Data, #5)
6.2. Anchors and referents
Anchors and referents of kin terms may be of first, second or third person. Thus, there are
nine logically possible person combinations of kin term anchors and referents. Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming) propose that probably only five of these combinations are
relatively common, viz. the ones indicated in table 9.
Table 9:
Common anchor-referent combinations
REFERENTS
ANCHORS
1st person
2nd person
3rd person
1st person
2nd person
l
l
3rd person
l
l
l
l = common combination
(Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm, forthcoming)
Unfortunately, Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm do not make it clear if the combinations that
they suggest are common apply to referential, vocative or predicative kin terms, or to any
use of kin terms. From the configuration of dots in table 9, we may conclude that at least
predicatively used kin terms are excluded from their analysis, since a sentence like I'm his
cousin, which I judge to be fairly common, would otherwise have justified a dot in the cell
for third person anchor and first person referent. It seems likely that Dahl and KoptjevskajaTamm have included both referential and vocative kin terms in their analysis. Further, they
seem to have included only individual kin terms and no collective ones. (Henceforth, for
29
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
ease of reference, I shall use abbreviations to refer to the person of anchors and referents:
1A-3R = first person anchor and third person referent, etc.)
We may now turn to the Samoan data in my text corpus, in order to find out whether it
supports the situation suggested by Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm. To get a clearer picture, I
counted the number of occurrences of the different person combinations for anchor and
referent separately for referential, vocative and predicative kin terms. I also separated
individual kin terms from collective ones, since the person combinations of the anchors and
referents of the two groups may show different patterns. Naturally, kin terms with out-offocus anchors were excluded from the analysis all together since the identity of their
anchors may be difficult or impossible to determine. The result for individual kin terms
used referentially are presented in table 10 below.
Table 10: Anchor-referent combinations with Samoan individual kin terms
referentially used
REFERENTS
ANCHORS
1st person
2nd person
3rd person
1st person
0
3
0
2nd person
5
0
2
3rd person
184
003
191
The data show that 1A-3R and 3A-3R kin terms are overwhelmingly more frequent than kin
terms with any other person combinations for anchor and referent. The fact that my text
corpus does not contain any real time dialogue surely account for the small number of 2A3R kin terms, which otherwise, I am confident, would have been more numerous. Given
that the combinations 1A-1R and 2A-2R are non-applicable with referential individual kin
terms, the only possible combination not attested in my corpus is 3A-1R. The use of the
most common referent-anchor combination in my corpus with referential kin terms, 3A-3R,
is illustrated by example (25) below. (Illustrations of the use of 1A-3R and 2A-3R
referential kin terms are not supplied separately; simply changing the third person
possessive pronoun of example (25), lona, 'his/her', into first person, lo'u, 'my', or second
person, lou, 'your', will provide such illustrations.)
3A-3R:
(25) 'o lo'o
PROG
soifua
mai lona
tama"
live
here
father
his/her
'His father is alive'
(Data, #2)
The use of referential kin terms with the less common person combinations of anchors and
referents, 2A-1R, 1A-2R and 3A-2R, are also presented in examples (26)-(28) below.
30
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
2A-1R:
(26) ['o] si
PR
SPEC.SG.EM
ou
uso
nei
your
sibling here
'ua
tu"
lava
i
INCH
stand indeed in
lona tofi
fafine
her
woman
duty
'Your sister here is on her womanly duty' (the writer is the addressee's sister)
(Data, #25)
1A-2R:
(27) Mo
for
le
uso
the sister
peleina
sweet
'for the dear sister' (opening line of letter to the writer's sister)
(Data, #23)
3A-2R:
(28) Mo
for
le
tina"
o
Niki
the
mother
of
NAME
'For Niki's mother' (opening line of letter to Niki's mother)
(Data, #18)
Kin terms used vocatively must by definition have second person referents, and presumably, first person anchors are the most common anchors of vocative kin terms crosslinguistically. This is reflected in my Samoan text corpus (though the vocative kin terms are
very few), as can be seen in table 11 below.
Table 11: Anchor-referent combinations with Samoan individual kin terms
vocatively used
REFERENTS
ANCHORS
1st person
2nd person
3rd person
1st person
0
0
0
2nd person
7
0
0
3rd person
0
0
0
All the seven occurrences of vocative individual kin terms denotes the kin type 'mother' (the
terms tina", 'mother', or mama, 'mom'), and they are all used as bare nouns without any
determiner or explicit indication as to the identity of the anchor. The implicit anchor of bare
noun vocative kin terms in Samoan is always interpreted to be the speaker, i.e. first person.
In English (and many other Indo-European languages) as opposed to Samoan, it is also
possible to use bare noun vocative kin terms with a third person anchor; for instance when a
man, in presence of his children, addresses his mother by the term granny. When a Samoan
vocative kin term involves explicit mention of the anchor, it is also always an anchor in the
first person. Example (29) below, taken from the lyrics of a song, is an illustration of the
use of vocative kin terms with implicit anchors, while (30) illustrates the use of vocative
kin terms with explicit anchors in Samoan.
31
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
1A-2R:
(29) Tina"
mother
ea,
po
'e
EMPH
Q
2.SG hear
lagona mai 'ita?
here
1.SG.EM
'Mother, do you hear me?'
(Data, #44)
1A-2R:
(30) si
SPEC.SG.EM
o'u
atali'i,
'ole'a"
'ou
alu i le
my
son.of.male
FUT
1.SG go
taimi nei
in the time
here
'My dear son, I will go now'
As for individual kin terms used predicatively, only the combinations 3A-1R, 1A-3R and
3A-3R are attested in my text corpus, as can be seen in table 12 below.
Table 12: Anchor-referent combinations with Samoan individual kin terms
predicatively used
REFERENTS
ANCHORS
1st person
2nd person
3rd person
1st person
0
0
3
2nd person
0
0
0
3rd person
06
00
27
At first, it may seem a little odd that only the above three combinations are attested, since,
if the 1A-1R and 2A-2R combinations are excluded, any combination is quite plausible and
entirely grammatical both in English and (as confirmed by my informant) in Samoan. This
is illustrated by English in (31)-(33) below.
(31) I am your/his uncle
(32) You are my/his uncle
(33) He is my/your/her uncle
2/3A-1R
1/3A-2R
1/2/3A-3R
18
Keeping in mind, however, that most of my corpus consists of genealogical information
intended to give information about the speakers relatives, it seems quite natural that no
combinations including second person are represented. Example (34) below illustrates the
use of a 3A-3R predicative kin term in Samoan.
3A-3R:
(34) 'o
PR
ia
'o
3.SG PR
le
tamateine
a
So'onafai
the
son.of.female
of
NAME
'He is So'onafai's son'
(Data, #3)
18
We may note that, as metaphoric extensions, even the combinations 1A-1R and 2A-2R are possible with
predicative kin terms, as exemplified by I am my own father and You are your own mother. Here, the kin
terms denote the social behaviour associated with the kin types 'father' and 'mother', and not the actual kin
relations (see also section 10.3).
32
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
If we now return to table 9 and the person combinations of anchors and referents
proposed to be common by Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming), we see that, with
regards to referential and vocative individual kin terms (at which their suggestion of
commonness seems to be targeted), the statistics obtained from the Samoan corpus verifies
the relative commonness of 1A-3R and 3A-3R kin terms (referential), and 1A-2R kin terms
(vocative), as well as the rarity of 3A-1R kin terms. The combinations 1A-1R and 2A-2R
are impossible for individual kin terms which is of course also reflected in the Samoan
corpus. As for the remaining three person combinations of anchors and referents (2A-1R,
3A-2R, 2A-3R), my text corpus is not representative of the situation in Samoan since it
does not involve any real time dialogue. However, while 2A-3R kin terms may be safely
regarded to be common, 2A-1R kin terms are probably less common and 3A-2R kin terms
quite rare, according to the judgement of my informant. On the whole, then, it seems that
the person combinations of anchors and referents suggested to be common by Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming) are also common in Samoan, perhaps with the exception of
2A-1R kin terms, with regards to referential and vocative individual kin terms.
Let us now turn briefly to the collective kin terms. The statistics for person combinations
of the anchors and referents of the referential collective kin terms in the corpus fall rather
close to those of the referential individual kin terms, with three notable and expected
exceptions, however. Since we apply the notion of semantic person, the combinations 1A1R and 2A-2R, which are not possible with referential individual kin terms, and the
combination 3A-1R, which is not attested in my corpus for referential individual kin terms,
are all attested for referential collective kin terms; see table 13 below.
Table 13: Anchor-referent combinations with Samoan collective kin terms
referentially used
REFERENTS
ANCHORS
1st person
2nd person
3rd person
1st person
28
00
02
2nd person
3
4
0
3rd person
12
01
78
Examples (35)-(37) are illustrations of the combinations 1A-1R, 2A-2R and 3A-1R.
1A-1R:
(35) e
feiloa'i 'uma ai
UNS meet
all
Ø
gafa
ma Ø
ANA SPEC.PL consanguine and SPEC.PL affine of the 1.PL
'All the relatives and in-laws of our family meet'
(Data, #5)
2A-2R:
(36) ...ma
le
paolo o le ma"tou 'a"iga
Samuelu a
le
tou
'a"iga
...and the NAME
of the 2.PL family
'...and the Samuelu of your family'
...(Data, #20)
33
family
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
3A-1R:
(37) E
to'a-
UNS HUM
-fitu
le
fa"nau
a
-be.seven
the
off-spring of
Ø
o'u
ma"tua
SPEC.PL
my
parent.PL
'My parents have seven children' or lit. 'The children of my parents are seven'
(Data, #2)
If we paraphrase the bold case kin terms above (and the phrases in which the occur) with
pronouns, the following ones are the best choices according to my informant: in (35), 'the
relatives and in-laws of our family' = 'our relatives and in-laws' (first person); in (36),
'Samuelu of your family' = 'your Samuelu' (second person); and in (37), 'The children of my
parents' = 'we' (first person) (cf. also section 5.2). There were no vocative collective kin
terms and only five predicative collective ones, of which the latter were distributed basically in the same way as the predicative individual kin terms.
6.3. Bare nouns
For some languages one of the linguistic characteristics of kin terms is that they may
commonly be used as bare nouns. This use generally resembles the use of proper names –
also normally used as bare nouns – in that they both typically refer to individuals well
known to the participants of the speech act in question. In such a proper-name-like use, bare
noun kin terms naturally have specific and distinct referents, and, morphosyntactically, are
treated as inherently definite and/or specific though they do not carry a definite or specific
marker (or any other determiner). Example (38) below illustrates this point for Hungarian.
HUNGARIAN:
(38) (a) Lát- -om
see
-1.SG.S/DEF.O
apu-
-t
father
-ACC
(b) Lát- -om
see
-1.SG.S/DEF.O
a
cicá- -t
DEF cat
-ACC
'I see (my) father'
'I see the cat'
(Beáta Megyesi, personal communication)
Note that the verb in both (a) and (b) appear in the definite object conjugation though only
cicá-, 'cat', and not apu-, 'father', is preceded by a definite article.
Samoan kin terms may also be used as bare nouns in a proper-name-like way in some
cases, but they appear as bare nouns in other ways as well. We may distinguish between
four principally different fashions in which Samoan kin terms may occur as bare nouns: (1)
kin terms with specific plural reference, (2) kin terms directly modifying nouns or verbs, (3)
predicative kin terms in either of the constructions fai ma or 'avea ma both translatable as
'become' (or 'be'), and (4) kin terms used in a proper-name-like way. Of these, the first three
are common to Samoan nouns in general, while the last one is exclusive to a limited group
of nominals among which are kin terms, as well as certain special terms of address, proper
names and pronouns. This section will first review briefly the use of specific plural kin
34
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
terms, kin terms directly modifying nouns or verbs, and predicative kin terms in 'become'constructions,19 and then deal with proper-name-like bare noun kin terms in more detail.
All Samoan kin terms employ the same set of articles for specificity/number as common
nouns in general, which also means that the absence of an article normally indicate plural
and specific reference with the kin term in question. The lack of an article also means that
the kin term appears as a bare noun. Cf. example (39) below.
(39) 'ole'a"
FUT
fo'i
mai
Ø
tama" i
le
return
hither
SPEC.PL
father
the day
in
Aso Sa"
sacred
'The fathers will return here on Sunday'
Specific plural kin terms are not bare by necessity, however, since they may be preceded by
plural demonstratives or plural possessive pronouns.20 They may also, of course, be
combined with various lexical modifiers. In other words, they are full-fledged NPs.
Kin terms directly modifying verbs or nouns cannot be combined with determiners of
any kind, which makes them appear as bare nouns in most cases. Consider for instance
examples (40) and (41) below.
(40) sa"
nofo ta"ne
PAST.IM
stay
i Falealupo
huband
in VILLAGE
'(She) used to be married (and was staying with her husband's family) in Falealupo'
(Data, #5)
(41) 'ua
INCH
lavevea
le
'au
uso
be.injured.PL the team same.sex.sibling
i
le
ta'avale
with
the
car
'The sisters/brothers were injured by the car'
(lit. 'The team of sisters/brothers...')
Kin terms in this use are non-specific. They merely indicate that the event expressed by the
verb or the entity referred to by the noun in some way involves the kin type denoted by the
kin term in question. Sometimes, kin terms in this use may also be modified themselves by
attributive lexical items, in which case they end up as what we have called expanded
nominals (see section 2.3).
In clauses with either of the predicative constructions fai ma (lit. 'do with') or 'avea ma
(lit. 'take with'), used to express the equivalent of English 'become' (or 'be'), the complement
of the preposition ma, 'with', may be a kin term and also a bare noun. The reason is that no
nouns in this position may combine with specific articles, as illustrated in (42) below.
19
Chapters 9 and 11 respectively will deal more closely with predicative kin term NPs and kin terms as
modifiers to verbs and nouns.
20
Both demonstratives and possessive pronouns have an internal structure including an article for number and
specificity as one of their elements. In perfect regularity, this element is also missing when demonstratives and
possessive pronouns determine specific plural nouns.
35
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(42) 'ole'a"
FUT
fai
Lita
ma
tina"
i
le
masina
fou
do
NAME
with
mother
in
the
month
next
'Lita will become a mother next month'
These nouns may however combine with other determiners, such as possessive pronouns,
and also be modified by attributive lexical items, which is why they may be regarded as full
NPs (however with some restrictions as to what determiners may be combined with the
head noun).
As for the proper-name-like bare noun use of kin terms, it is not all that common in
Samoan, since kin terms seem to be well integrated in the system of grammatical marking
of NPs. There are, however, a few instances where kin terms are used as bare nouns in a
proper-name-like way. Such instances will be discussed in the remainder of this section.
Kin terms used vocatively are often, though not necessarily, bare nouns, even if kin
terms are rarely used as vocatives at all in Samoan. Here, parental 1A-2R kin terms are
predominant, if not exclusive, as indeed they are in my text corpus. Example (43) may serve
as an illustration.
(43) Aue" mama
IJ
mom
e,
toe
sau
VOC again come
'Oh mom, come back'
(Data, #49)
It is interesting to note that whenever a kin term occurs vocatively as a bare noun, i.e. with
an implicit anchor, it tends to be one of the parental terms tina", 'mother', tama", 'father',
mama, 'mom' or papa, 'dad'. For all other kin terms used vocatively my informant prefers to
include an explicit anchor in form of an emotional possessive pronoun. This is of course, as
Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming) have pointed out, due to the fact that parental kin
terms usually have unique referents within a family.
Vocative kin terms resemble interjections in that they fall outside the syntactic structure
of the clause, but even kin terms within the syntactic structure of the clause may occasionally be used as bare nouns in a proper-name-like way under certain circumstances in
Samoan. We shall look closer at one such circumstance.21
Samoan has a locative preposition i, 'in', 'at', and a directional preposition 'i, 'to', which
appear as ia" and 'ia" respectively when used before proper names and personal pronouns.
Etymologically, these latter variants may be derived from a preposition and a proprial
article, a. In present day Samoan this proprial article is only found in co-occurrence with
these prepositions, but it was probably formerly used with proper names and personal
pronouns also in other syntactic contexts (as it still is in some other Polynesian languages,
for instance Maori (Bauer, 1993)). What is interesting is that the proprial variants of the
Samoan locative/directional prepositions may also take kin terms as objects if they are used
21
Another circumstance in which kin terms may be used as bare nouns in a proper-name-like way involves
predicative kin term NPs together with the verbs fa'aigoa, 'call', and ta'ua, 'call', and will be discussed in
chapter 9.
36
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
in a proper-name-like way without determiners. Such kin terms may either appear as bare
nouns or expanded nominals.
The kin terms available for use in proprial locative/directional PPs are the set of
consanguineal individual proper kin terms (with the exception of tei, '(younger) collateral
relative'). Thus, affinal terms like to'alua, 'spouse', collective terms like fa"nau, 'children',
and improper and semi-proper kin terms like tama, 'offspring of a female', and tamatama,
'son of a female', are all excluded from this use.
Of the kin terms that may be used in proprial locative/directional PPs, the parental kin
terms tina", 'mother', tama", 'father', mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad', occupy a special position.
This is reflected by the fact that parental kin terms following proprial prepositions normally
appear as bare nouns, while other kin terms following proprial prepositions normally occur
accompanied by an attributive constituent that helps establishing the referent as unique
within its context, i.e. they appear as expanded nominals rather than bare nouns. The special
position of parental kin terms is also reflected by the frequency of use in proprial locative/directional PPs, which according to the judgement of my informant is higher with
parental kin terms than with other kin terms.22
The following examples illustrate the use of the proprial directional preposition 'ia", 'to',
together with personal pronouns (in (44)), proper names (in (45)), parental kin terms (in
(46)), and non-parental kin terms (in (47)).
(44) 'Ua
INCH
'ou
sau 'i- -a"
1.SG come to
'oe
-PROP 2.SG
'I have come to you'
(45) sa"
'ou
PAST.IM
va'ai
1.SG see
'i- -a"
to
Palota
-PROP NAME
'I saw Palota'
(46) sa"
'ou
PAST.IM
fai 'i- -a"
1.SG say to
tina"
e
-PROP mother
sau
UNS come
'I told my mother to come'
(Data, #26)
(47) 'ua
INCH
'ou
'avea le
1.SG give
tupe
'i- -a"
the money to
tuagane
-PROP
ulu- -matua
brother.of.female head -old
'I have given the money to my oldest brother'
In (46) and (47), the kin terms are rendered as referring to the speaker's relative, i.e. 1A-3R.
Depending on the situation, however, any person combination that includes a first or second
person anchor (apart from the impossible 1A-1R and 2A-2R) is possible with kin terms
used in proprial locative/directional PPs. (48) below exemplifies this for the combination
2A-1R.
22
My text corpus does not supply sufficient information about the frequency of use of different kin terms in
proprial locative/directional PPs, since there were only two occurrences of this use – both of which, however,
were parental terms.
37
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(48) Sau e
fesoasoani 'i-
come UNS give.help
to
-a"
tama"
-PROP
father
'Come and help (your) father' (said by a father to his child)
If the kin terms are not used as bare nouns or expanded nominals, however, they cannot be
preceded by a proprial locative/directional preposition. Thus, if a determiner, like lo'u, 'my',
as in example (49) below, is present, the preposition assumes its non-proprial appearance.
(49) sa"
PAST.IM
'ou
fai 'i
1.SG say to
lo'u tina"
e
my
UNS come
mother
sau
'I told my mother to come'
My informant judges the use of kin terms with non-proprial locative/directional prepositions (like in (49)) to be more common than their use with proprial prepositions (like in (46)
through (48)). This is confirmed by my text corpus in which the former use occurs 58 times,
while the latter use occurs only twice. Specifically for parental kin terms, the ratio is 13
tokens of the former as against only 2 tokens of the latter. Nevertheless, kin terms' ability to
occur together with a proprial preposition is one manifestation of their special treatment in
Samoan grammar.
It is interesting to note that while it is possible, but not the norm, for the adult language
parental kin terms tina", 'mother', and tama", 'father', to be used as proper-name-like bare
nouns in locative/directional PPs, it seems that for the child language versions of parental
kin terms, mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad', it is the proper-name-like bare noun use that prevails in this syntactic position; at least it sounds more natural to the ears of my informant.
Consider for instance (50) and (51) below, of which the latter is not ungrammatical but
slightly unconventional.
(50) ta
1.SG.DIM
fia
alu
want go
'i- -a"
papa
to
-PROP dad
'i
lo'u
papa
to
my
dad
'I want to go to dad.'
(Milner, 1966:175)
(51) ta
1.SG.DIM
fia
alu
want go
'I want to go to dad.'
Thus, it seems that the parental variants mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad', are somewhat less
integrated in the system of grammatical marking of NPs in Samoan than the parental
variants of the adult language, tina", 'mother', tama", 'father'. This is expected since mama,
'mom', and papa, 'dad', are borrowings of a relatively recent date (they have probably come
into use in Samoan only within the last 100-150 years). It is likely that they have spread
38
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
from an original vocative bare noun use23 to referential uses like that in (50) above. The
grammaticalization process by which determiners are spread to new lexical items has not,
however, been at work long enough to completely engulf these terms.
As we have seen in this section, some Samoan kin terms may in some cases be used
without determiners as proper-name-like bare nouns or expanded nominals. In this use,
parental kin terms occupy a special position, which is manifested by their high frequency
among vocative kin terms; their proneness to appear as bare nouns rather than expanded
nominals in proprial locative/directional PPs (headed by either of the prepositions ia", 'in',
'at', and 'ia", 'to'); and the preference for the parental terms mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad', to
appear as proper-name-like bare nouns rather than preceded by determiners in locative/directional PPs. There appear to be two main reasons for this situation in Samoan.
First, there is the fact that parental kin terms normally have highly or totally predictable
anchors and referents within their context of use, since they usually have unique reference
in the family, which often makes determiners redundant. In Samoan, the parental terms tina",
'mother', tama", 'father', mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad', are the only consanguineal kin terms
with unique reference within the family (cf. table 4 in section 4.2). Then there is of course
also the fact that the Samoan set of parental kin terms includes loan words – mama, 'mom',
and papa, 'dad' – relatively recently introduced into the language.
We may conclude by resuming the fact that while it is possible for Samoan kin terms to
be used as proper-name-like bare nouns (or expanded nominals), this use is not at all common, since the linguistic contexts in which it normally occurs are very marginal on the
whole in Samoan: (i) the use of vocative kin terms is infrequent, (ii) the use of the child
language parental terms is infrequent, and (iii) it is less common to use the proprial prepositions ia", 'in', 'at', or 'ia", 'to', with kin terms (even the parental ones) in locative/directional
PPs than to use the non-proprial variants i, or 'i. The main impression is that kin terms
(perhaps with the exception of mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad') are highly integrated in
Samoan grammar, and, with a few exceptions, appear much like other common nouns with
respect to the grammatical marking of NPs.
6.4. Contextual versus out-of-focus implicit anchors
In this section, we will look at the distribution of contextual and out-of-focus implicit
anchors in Samoan between bare noun kin terms used in a proper-name-like way and kin
terms marked for specific or non-specific reference but without any mention of the anchor.
Samoan proper-name-like bare noun kin terms have contextual anchors, i.e. it is possible
to infer from the context the identity of the anchor, and the addressee(s) must make this
identification correctly in order to understand the utterance as intended. Samoan kin terms
used with non-specific articles but without any mention of the anchor, on the other hand,
have out-of-focus anchors, i.e. the identity of the anchor is not of importance (even if it may
be inferred from the context), but rather the quality of the kin type denoted by the kin term.
The situation is similar to that in English in so far that out-of-focus implicit anchors go
23
The vocative use is suggested by Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (unpublished) to be the main renewal site for
kin terms in general.
39
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
together with kin terms with a determiner, like in (52) below, while contextual implicit
anchors go together with proper-name-like bare noun kin terms, like in (53).
(52) There was no mother around to cook the food
(53) I told mom not to worry
However, Samoan kin terms determined by specific articles (or having specific plural
reference by virtue of lacking an article) but without any mention of the anchor, may have
either out-of-focus anchors, as in (54), or contextual anchors, as in (55), depending on the
context.
(54) 'ole'a"
FUT
ta'ua 'ima"'ua
'o
Ø
ma"tua [...]
i
le
masina fou
call
PR
SPEC.PL
parent.PL
in
the
month
1.DU.EX
next
'(We) may call ourselves parents next month'
(Data, #4)
(55) Mo
for
le
uso
peleina
SPEC.SG
sister
sweet
'for my dear sister' (lit. '...the dear sister')
(Data, #23)
This is quite different from the situation in English where, when a kin term with specific
reference and without an explicit anchor is determined by a definite (or indefinite) marker,
the anchor is always an out-of-focus one, and never a contextual one, as exemplified by
(56).
(56) (a) Everyone congratulated the father
(b) This is a story about a father who worked very hard
The situation in Samoan may be schematised as in figure 1 below. (The size of the boxes
makes no claims about frequency in use – what is important is the relative placement of the
borders between them.)
Figure 1: Samoan kin terms with implicit anchors
Type of kin term:
Type of anchor:
non-specific
specific
out-of-focus
proper-name-like bare noun
contextual
(Relative size; not to scale)
In English, the border between out-of-focus and contextual anchors coincides with the
border between specific kin terms with implicit anchors and proper-name-like bare noun
kin terms.
It appears that in cases where the identities of the anchor and the referent of a kin term is
clear from the contexts making mention of the anchor redundant, possessive pronouns or
40
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
possessive PPs explicitly indicating the anchor may sometimes be left out in Samoan. In
certain linguistic contexts (as discussed in section 6.3), this leads to bare nouns (or
expanded nominals), while in other linguistic contexts, it leads to kin terms marked for
specific reference, but without explicit anchors, as for instance in example (55) above.
41
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
7. POSSESSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS
The anchor and referent of a kin relation may usually be associated with the possessor and
possessee respectively of a possessive relation, even though kinship has little to do with
ownership. In most languages, however, the same morphosyntactic constructions are used
to express a wide range of semantically rather different kinds of relations, of which both
ownership relations and kin relations are part. Consider the following (non-exhausting)
examples in English:
(57) a. My car broke down
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
relations involving legal ownership
relation involving temporary use
associative relations
relations involving abstract items
kinship relations
relations involving body parts
relations involving other inseparatable
parts of a whole
Did you catch your train?
I support my team
Don't hurt her feelings!
You heard your father!
His fingers are long
Do you see that mountain?
I climbed its summit
There are quite a few languages, however, that distinguish between inalienable and
alienable possession by means of different morphosyntactic constructions. The former
always includes at least one of the kinds of relations in (57e)-(f) above, while the latter
includes other kinds of relations (typically ownership). Inalienable possession is often
described as involving a natural, inherent or necessary bond between the possessor and the
possessee, while alienable possession is described as involving a contingent, acquired or
accidental bond between the two. As pointed out, however, by for instance Nichols (1988)
and Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (1998), it seems difficult to come up with general rules, that
apply cross-linguistically (or language internally), which determine whether an alienable or
an inalienable construction can be used in a certain case. (58) below show examples of
inalienable (a) and alienable (b) possessive constructions in A'ara (of the Central Isabel
subgroup of Oceanic, Austronesian; spoken in the Solomon Islands).
A'ARA
(58) (a) kmafather
-nya
(b) no-
-POSS.3.SG
CLASS
'His father'
(Lichtenberk, 1985:104)
-gu
mola
iara
-POSS.1.SG canoe
1.SG
'My canoe'
(Lichtenberk, 1985:99)
As we can see, the construction in (a) involves a possessive suffix which indicates the possessor, while the construction in (b) involves a possessive pronoun (in form of a classifier
and a possessive suffix) and a personal pronoun, both indicating the possessor. It is quite
common that, like in the A'ara examples, inalienable constructions involve inflection of the
possessed noun, while alienable constructions are analytically structured.
Samoan (as Polynesian languages in general) is not seldomly thought of as encoding
alienability morphologically by employing two different possessive markers, a (described
as alienable) and o (described as inalienable). These markers indicate the possessor in the
42
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
relation, and either marker may be used with both pronominal possessors (fusionally) and
lexical possessors (analytically as prepositions), as shown by examples (59)-(62) below.
(59) lSPEC.SG
-o-
-na
uso
-POSS -3.SG
same.sex.sibling
'his brother' / 'her sister'
(60) lSPEC.SG
-a-
-na
niu
-POSS -3.SG
coconut
'his/her coconut'
(61) le
uso
o
le
teine
SPEC.SG same.sex.sibling POSS SPEC.SG girl
'the girl's sister'
(62) le
niu
SPEC.SG coconut
a
le
teine
POSS SPEC.SG girl
'the girl's coconut'
These constructions, however, are more properly described in terms of dominance or control than in terms of alienability, since the a-construction seems to be chosen when the possessor is dominating the possessee in some sense, or has some sort of control over the relation, while the o-construction is chosen otherwise. In consequence, the opposition
between the two markers a and o in Samoan lacks some of the core characteristics of the
opposition between alienable and inalienable constructions cross-linguistically. For instance, both the Samoan a- and o-constructions are productive and possessees derived from
nominalizations or loan words may enter into either construction depending on their relation to the possessor. This is not commonly the case in languages with a typical alienability split, where (1) the nouns available as possessees to the inalienable construction constitute a closed – and not an open – set, restricted to a small part of the lexicon (Nichols,
1988), and (2) the inalienable construction is not normally used with nominalizations as
possessees (Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 1996). Further, inalienable constructions tend to involve
inflection of the possessed noun (head marking) or to be zero marked and involve mere
juxtaposition, as opposed to alienable constructions which often involve inflection of the
possessor noun (dependent marking) or are analytic constructions (Dahl/KoptjevskajaTamm, 1998). The Samoan a- and o-constructions, on the other hand, are identical structurally, both involving possessive marking of the possessor noun (dependent marking) (cf.
examples (59)-(62) above). Also, while inalienable constructions tend to be older constructions whose domains have been taken over to a large extent by new expanding alienable
constructions (Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 1998), there is no evidence that either a- or oconstructions in Samoan are older than the other, or that one have been expanding at the
expense of the other; both constructions are reconstructed for Proto-Polynesian, the breakup
of which is estimated to about 500 BC (Clark, 1976).
One characteristic, however, that the Samoan o-construction shares with typical
inalienable constructions is that it is normally used with kin terms; most Samoan kin terms
43
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
are obligatorily possessed by possessors marked with o. It seems that the possessor's control
over the relation is the primary factor in these cases in Samoan. Naturally, one does not
exercise the same kind of control over the relation to one's kin as one does over the relation
to things like food and tools, which thus favours o-marked possessors with kin terms.
However, a small group of kin terms are obligatorily possessed by possessors marked with
a. Let us look at these kin terms – listed in table 14 – in an attempt to account for their
deviation from the pattern.24
Table 14: Kin terms in present day Samoan taking a-marked
possessors
a"va"
ta"ne
fa"nau
tama
tamatama
tamateine
wife
husband
off-spring (collective reference only)
off-spring of female (or of couple)
son of a female (or of couple)
daughter of a female (or of couple)
We may observe that all kin terms that appear as heads of a-possessive constructions are
either affinal kin terms or non-proper kin terms (i.e. improper or semi-proper kin terms; see
tables 5 and 6 in section 4.2) – or both. Thus, the reason why a"va", 'wife', and ta"ne,
'husband', take a-marked possessors may be that they denote affinal relations over which the
anchor, i.e. the possessor in a possessive construction, has control, since a person normally
can choose whom to marry. And the reason why fa"nau, 'off-spring', tama, 'off-spring of
female', tamatama, 'son of female', and tamateine, 'daughter of female' (and again ta"ne,
'husband'), take a-marked possessors may be that they are improper or semi-proper kin
terms, which have, or used to have, other meanings outside the kinship system. Thus, we
may associate consanguineal proper kin terms with o-marked possessors and affinal kin
terms and non-proper kin terms with a-marked possessors.
This analysis, however, is not flawless, since there are three terms that take o-marked
possessors in spite of their being affinal and/or improper kin terms; matua, 'parent'
(improper), paolo, 'affinal relatives' (affinal), and to'alua, 'spouse' (affinal/improper). We
may account for the fact that matua, 'parent', takes o-marked possessors either by assuming
that it was originally a proper kin term and that its other meanings, 'old', 'be old', are derived
from its kin term meaning, or by assuming the opposite; that it originally meant 'old', 'be
old' or perhaps 'something old' and that anyone's relationship to something old is one of
subordinance. Either case would favour o-marked possessors. As for paolo, 'affinal
relatives', a tentative explanation would be that its collective reference may play a role in
making an anchor, in some sense, subordinate, which then favours o-marked possessors.
We may note that all kin terms with collective reference take o-marked possessors. It is
rather more difficult to explain why to'alua, 'spouse', takes o-marked possessors since both
a"va", 'wife', and ta"ne, 'husband', take a-marked possessors. Perhaps it has to do with the fact
that to'alua also means 'be two' used of people, so that in way, referring to a spouse by this
24
In Appendix B, all Samoan kin terms considered in this paper are listed with regards to their taking amarked or o-marked possessors in possessive constructions.
44
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
word means explicitly referring to the second part of a union of which the anchor is also a
(subordinate) part, thus evoking o-marked possessors.
In conclusion, then, it seems that the great majority of kin terms in Samoan, i.e. the
consanguineal proper kin terms, regularly take o-marked possessors, while affinal kin terms
and improper and semi-proper kin terms may take either a-marked possessors or o-marked
possessors depending on the semantics of the relation they denote and/or perhaps the
history of the word. We may also note that kin terms do not generate special possessive
constructions since they enter into both a- and o-constructions, neither of which is exclusive
to kin terms.
45
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
8. MARKEDNESS HIERARCHIES
In this chapter, I will go through some of Greenberg's (1966) proposed hierarchies among
kin terms in comparison with my Samoan corpus. I shall use the following three criteria of
markedness:
Structure: The marked category often has overt phonetic expression where the
unmarked category is indicated by zero.
Defectivation: The unmarked category tends to have more distinctions than the
marked category (e.g. a distinction between male and female) making the
marked category defective in the paradigm.
Frequency: The unmarked category occurs in greater number in a text than the
marked one.
8.1. Consanguineal versus affinal kin terms
According to Greenberg (1966), consanguineal kin terms are unmarked as against affinal
kin terms. This is supported by Samoan with regards to all three criteria of markedness used
here.
As mentioned in section 4.2, it is possible to add the phrase i le tula"fono, 'in-law', to the
consanguineal kin terms of the nuclear family to indicate the corresponding affinal kin ties
(though it is rarely used). Thus, where affinal terms have a special phonetic marker,
consanguineal terms have none, which indicates the markedness of the former over the
latter according to the structural criterion.
Also, since it is not possible to add the phrase i le tula"fono, 'in-law', to all consanguineal
kin terms but only to the ones designating members of the nuclear family, the affinal
paradigm is defective as compared to the consanguineal, which, also according to the
criterion of defectivation, indicates the markedness of affinal terms as compared to
consanguineal ones. One can also reflect that there are only 4 distinct affinal terms in the
Samoan language (to'alua, 'spouse', a"va", 'wife', ta"ne, 'husband', and the general paolo
'affinal relatives') as against at least some 20 consanguineal terms commonly used in
present day Samoan.
Finally, according to the frequency criterion, Samoan consanguineal kin terms are clearly
unmarked as against affinal ones; the former occurs in my text corpus with 546 tokens as
against 44 occurrences of the latter.
8.2. Ascending versus descending kin terms
Greenberg (1966) claims that ascending kin terms are unmarked as against descending kin
terms of equal genealogical distance from the anchor. The different markedness criteria
support this, though not all that distinctly, for the Samoan data.
As for the structural criterion, it is hard to find suitable ascending and descending terms
to compare since Samoan has a relatively small inventory of simple kin terms (cf. section
46
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
4.2). However, there is one obvious case where a pair of descending kin terms involve
phonetic expression to distinguish gender where the ascending terms of equal genealogical
distance from the anchor do not, thus indicating the markedness of the former as against the
latter terms in Samoan. With the descending terms tamateine, 'daughter of female (or
couple)', and tamatama, 'son of female (or couple)', sex is distinguished explicitly by the
addition of teine, 'girl', and tama, 'boy', to the gender neutral term tama, 'offspring of female
(or couple)'. With the ascending terms tina", 'mother', and tama", 'father', on the other hand,
the roots themselves distinguish sex, and no additional morpheme is needed for that
purpose. The gender neutral ascending kin term matua, 'parent', does not take modifiers
indicating sex; for instance *matua fafine (lit. 'woman parent') meaning 'mother', makes no
sense in Samoan.
As for the criterion of defectivation, we may continue to compare the terms for the first
ascending generation with the terms for the first descending generation. In the parental
paradigm the terms tina", 'mother', and tama", 'father', distinguish sex with the referent. In the
case of a male's off-spring, the terms afafine, 'daughter', and atali'i, 'son', also distinguish
sex with the referent. However, in the case of a female's off-spring, as we have just seen,
the terms tamateine, 'daughter', and tamatama, 'son', only distinguish sex with the referent
by the additional morphemes -teine, 'girl', and -tama, 'boy'. Thus, while there are distinct
morphemes for mother and father, and for a male's daughter and a male's son, there is only
one monomorphemic term for a female's off-spring, tama (which is, however, often
modified by the morphemes for boy and girl). This means that we have a gender distinction
in the terms for the first ascending generation, but that we, in the case of a female's offspring as far as monomorphemic terms are concerned, do not have a gender distinction in
the term for the first descending generation, which indicates the unmarkedness of the
ascending terms as against the descending terms in Samoan according to the criterion of
defectivation. It is quite likely that the terms afafine, 'daughter of a male', and atali'i, 'son of
a male', were once also dimorphemic (at least), since fafine means woman and ali'i is the
polite word for man, which in that case would be a further indication of the markedness of
the descending terms in question as against the corresponding ascending ones.
The fact that there are two separate sets of terms in Samoan for kinsmen of the first
descending generation depending on the sex of the anchor but not for kinsmen of the first
ascending generation confirms another proposal made by Greenberg (1966:79):
If there are two terms differing in generation such that when a person x calls a
person y by the first term, y calls x by the second, and if only one of the terms
involves in its definition the sex of the anchor ('speaker' in Greenberg's (1966)
words), it is always the term of lower generational reference which contains the
sex of the speaker in its definition.
As for the frequency criterion, kin terms designating kinsmen of the first ascending
generation occur with 212 tokens in my text corpus as against 116 for the first descending
generation. Though not overwhelmingly, this indicates the unmarkedness of the former as
against the latter.
47
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
8.3. Lineal versus collateral kin terms
Lineal kin terms are unmarked as against collateral kin terms (Greenberg, 1966). This is
clearly so also in Samoan.
In many cases where a lineal kin relation is expressed by a simple kin term, the only way
of expressing a corresponding collateral term is by a circumlocution. Thus, we have 'o lo'u
tama" for 'my father' but only 'o le uso o lo'u tama" for 'my (paternal) uncle' (lit. 'the brother
of my father'), and 'o lo'u afafine for 'my daughter' but only 'o le afafine o lo'u uso for 'my
niece' (lit. 'the daughter of my brother'). The structural criterion of markedness, then,
indicates that collateral kin terms are marked as against lineal ones in Samoan.
The fact that there are simple kin terms for mother, father, daughters and sons in
Samoan, but no simple kin terms for aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews is also an indication
of the markedness of collateral kin terms as against lineal kin terms according to the
criterion of defectivation.
Also the frequency criterion point in the same direction; in my text corpus there are 329
occurrences of lineal simple kin terms and only 134 occurrences of collateral ones.25
8.4. Generational distance
Kin terms denoting kin types of generations more remote from the anchor are marked as
against kin terms denoting kin types of generations less remote from the anchor (Greenberg,
1966). This statement is also supported by the situation in Samoan.
Firstly, all but one of the individual kin terms used in present day Samoan denote kin
types either of the same generation as the anchor or of the first ascending or descending
generation. The exception is tei, 'younger collateral relative', which may denote kin types of
further generational distance from the anchor. However, also tei is mostly used for referents
within the same generation or of the first descending generation. To explicitly express the
relation to for instance a grandmother, circumlocutions like 'o le tina" o lo'u tina", 'my
(maternal) grandmother', or 'o le tina" o lona tama", 'his/her (paternal) grandmother', have to
be used. These circumlocutions indicate the markedness of Samoan kin terms denoting kin
types more distant than one generation away from the anchor as against other kin terms
according to the structural criterion, while the fact that present day Samoan to a large extent
lacks simple kin terms for kin types more distant than one generation away from the anchor
is an indication their markedness according to the criterion of defectivation.
As for frequency, in my text corpus only 40 tokens of simple kin terms (out of a total of
590 simple kin terms) occur in kin circumlocutions denoting kin types further removed
from the anchor than one generation. There were no occurrences of the term tei, 'younger
collateral relative', which did not have a referent within the same generation as the anchor
or of the first ascending or descending generation. Thus, the frequency criterion confirms
the markedness of generational distance for Samoan.
25
Sibling terms are counted as collateral kin terms.
48
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
9. PREDICATIVE KIN TERM NPS AND RELATED CASES
Samoan predicative NPs occur in two different types of clauses: (1) in equative clauses
which are normally formed by two juxtaposed NPs, and (2) in clauses containing verbs of
naming and addressing. Kin terms may occur in both these types of clauses which will be
exemplified below.
In equative clauses, one of the two NPs which are usually present is predicating a certain
identity or quality to the referent of the other, which is the subject of the clause.26 This is
exemplified by (63) below.
(63) 'O
PR
ni
ma"tua
NONSP.PL parent.PL
agalelei tele lea
toea'ina ma
le
lo'omatua
kind
old.man
the
old.woman
very
this
and
'This old man and the old woman were very kind parents'
(Data, #4)
Thus, in this example 'o ni ma"tua agalelei tele, 'very kind parents', is the predicate of the
clause. In Samoan, arguments of a predicate are not obligatory constituents of the clause if
they are clear from the context, which means that subjects of equative clauses (like other
types of arguments) may be left out. Thus, equative clauses may consist of a single
(predicative) NP, like in (64) below.
(64) 'o
PR
le
afafine
fo'i
o
Matofai
the
daughter.of.male
also
of
NAME
'(She is) also the daughter of Matofai'
(Data, #3)
The unmarked constituent order of Samoan equative clauses is that in which the predicate
precedes the subject (if the subject is present). In these cases, the predicative NP is always
marked by the presentative marker 'o, while the subject is unmarked in the absolutive case
(cf. example (63) above). However, the subject may also occur first, in which case both the
subject NP and the predicative NP are marked by the presentative marker 'o, like in (65)
below.
(65) 'o
PR
a'u
'o
1.SG PR
lana
tamateine
his
daughter.of.female
'I am her daughter'
(Data, #4)
Predicative kin terms in equative clauses seem to be treated like other common nouns, and
may not for instance appear as bare nouns in a proper-name-like way. Out of the 42
26
I am using the term "equative" in the same sense as Mosel/Hovdhaugen (1992) use the term "equational",
i.e. as a technical term for a syntactic construction rather than a semantic category since Samoan equational
clauses do not only express equation (cf. Mosel/Hovdhaugen, 1992:500).
49
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
occurrences of predicative kin term NPs in my data corpus, 29 were predicates in equative
clauses.
Predicative NPs also occur in clauses containing verbs of naming and addressing. These
verbs – including both intransitive and transitive verbs – can be combined with an NP,
normally marked by the presentative marker 'o, predicating a name, identity or quality to the
referent of the absolutive argument of the clause. Verbs of naming and addressing seem to
be limited to the small number of verbs listed in table 15 below (Mosel/Hovdhaugen,
1992).
Table 15: Samoan verbs of naming and addressing
————————————————————————
INTRANSITIVE
igoa
'be called', 'have the name'
TRANSITIVE
fa'alagi
'address as'
fa'aigoa 'call', 'give the name'
"
ta'ua 27
'call'
"
————————————————————————
Of these verbs, igoa, 'be called', is normally used to predicate proper names, while fa'alagi,
'address as', is normally used to predicate titles of high prestige, like in examples (66) and
(67) below respectively.
(66) E
igoa
le
UNS be.called the
la"'au
lea
'o
le
Fatumomoso
tree
this
PR
the
NAME
'This tree is called Fatumomoso'
(67) E
fa'alagi
UNS call
Seu
'o
le
NAME
PR the
ali'i
chief
'Seu is addressed as the chief'
(Mosel/Hovdhaugen, 1992:113)
The verbs fa'aigoa and ta'ua on the other hand may predicate a number of things, among
which are names, nick names, titles, terms of endearment, terms of dislike, and kin terms.
(68) and (69) below constitute examples with predicative kin term NPs.
(68) sa"
fa'aigoa
PAST.PT
call
e
le
ERG the
tama le
lo'omatua
'o
lona tina"
boy
old.woman
PR
his
the
mother
'The boy called the old woman his mother'
(69) la"tou te
3.PL
ta'ua ma"tou
UNS call
1.PL.EX
'o
Ø
o
la"tou tei
PR
SPEC.PL
POSS
3.PL
collateral.(younger.)relative
'They call us their tei'
(Data, #4)
27
Perhaps also the transitive verb ta'u, 'tell', may be used as a verb of naming and addressing with the meaning
'call by the name' (cf. Mosel/Hovdhaugen, 1992:112).
50
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
Of these verbs, only ta'ua, 'call', is combined with a predicative kin term NP in my data
corpus. There are 13 occurrences of predicative kin term NPs with this verb.
Interestingly, when the absolutive argument of either of the verbs fa'aigoa, 'call', and
ta'ua, 'call', is in the singular, it is possible to use the parental kin terms tina", 'mother', tama",
father', mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad', as bare nouns (however marked by the presentative
case marker 'o) in a proper-name-like way. This use seems to be exclusive to parental kin
terms. Thus, (68) above may also be expressed as in (70) below.
(70) sa"
PAST.PT
fa'aigoa
call
e
le
ERG the
tama le
lo'omatua
'o
tina"
boy
old.woman
PR
mother
the
'The boy called the old woman his mother'
For the terms tina", 'mother', and tama", father', the bare noun use of predicative kin terms is
equally well accepted by my informant as the use with a determiner, while for the terms
mama, 'mom', and papa, 'dad', the bare noun use sounds much more natural. As we can see,
the pattern of parental kin terms receiving special treatment, as well as the differentiation
between the child language and the adult language parental terms, that were discussed in
section 6.3, are also evident here. As for the implicit anchor of predicative bare noun kin
terms, it is equal to the referent of the subject of the clause (i.e. the ergative argument),
while the referent of the kin relation is equal to the referent of the direct object (i.e. the
absolutive argument). If the subject is left out, the kin term anchor has the same identity as
the would-be subject (whether generic or clear from the context). There are no examples of
predicative proper-name-like bare noun kin terms in the presentative case in my corpus.
The predicative constituent with the verbs igoa, 'be called', and fa'aigoa, 'call', may also
occur as a directional PP marked by the proprial directional preposition 'ia", 'to', instead of
as an NP in the presentative case, if the noun in question is a kin term (with fa'aigoa) or a
proper name (with both igoa and fa'aigoa). As for kin terms in this use, they appear in a
proper-name-like way either as bare nouns or as expanded nominals, in the way discussed
in section 6.3 above. This use does not seem to be very common (there are no examples of
this in my corpus) but it constitutes an interesting option in the language for kin term NPs
to be grouped together with proper names. Thus, modelling again on (68) above, the
example may also be expressed as in (71) below.
(71) sa"
PAST.PT
fa'aigoa
call
e
le
ERG the
tama le
lo'omatua
'ia"
tina"
boy
old.woman
to
mother
the
'The boy called the old woman his mother'
As we saw in section 6.3, bare kin terms (and expanded nominal kin terms) in proprial
directional PPs could be substituted for full kin term NPs (preceded by determiners) in nonproprial PPs (of which the latter was the more frequently used construction). This is
however not possible in cases such as in (71) above without a change in meaning, as is
exemplified in (72) below.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(72) sa"
fa'aigoa
PAST.PT
call
e
le
ERG the
tama le
lo'omatua
'i
lona
tina"
boy
old.woman
to
his
mother
the
'The boy called the old woman by his mother's name' or
'The boy gave the old woman his mother's name' 28
There is also another nominal use of Samoan kin terms which may be considered to be
predicative. In clauses containing either of the predicative constructions 'avea ma (lit. 'take
with') or fai ma (lit. 'do with'), both translatable as 'become' or 'be', the complement of the
preposition ma, 'with', may be a kin term NP. This NP cannot take determination by articles
and may appear as a bare noun (however not used in a proper-name-like way), as
exemplified in (73) below, but may also be determined by for instance possessive pronouns
(lacking the article element), as exemplified in (74).
(73) 'Ua
'avea a'u
INCH
take
ma
tama"
1.SG with
father
'I have become a father'
(74) 'Ua
fai le
INCH
do
teine
the girl
a"va"
ma
o-
-na
with
POSS -3.SG
wife
'The girl has become his wife'
The fact that these NPs cannot take determination by articles is not peculiar to kin terms; it
is rather peculiar of this particular construction, which is obvious from examples (75) and
(76) below without kin terms.
(75) 'ua
'a"mata ona
'avea a'u
ma tagata matua
INCH start
SUBCL take 1.SG with person old
'I am becoming an adult'
(Mosel/Hovdhaugen, 1992:113)
(76) 'o
lona
PR her
moe 'umi i
sleep long
le
taeao
'ua
in the morning INCH
fai
ma
ana masani
do
with
her
habit
'Sleeping late in the morning has become her habit'
There were no examples in my data corpus of kin terms as complements of the predicative
constructions fai ma, 'become', or 'avea ma, 'become' / 'be'.
28
According to my informant, this second interpretation is the more natural one, but since it is (probably)
impossible for the referent of the ergative NP (the boy) to have had anything to do with the naming of the
referent of the absolutive NP (the old woman), i.e. giving her her proper name, it is quite unlikely for a clause
such as (72) to be used. It would be more natural if the referent of the ergative constituent was older than the
referent of the absolutive constituent, and thus possibly involved in naming him/her.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
We may conclude by saying that while predicative kin term NPs in equative clauses are
treated like ordinary common nouns, predicative kin term NPs with verbs of naming and
addressing may optionally be treated like proper names. Specially noteworthy here is the
use of parental kin terms with the verbs fa'aigoa, 'call', and ta'ua, 'call', as proper-name-like
bare nouns in the presentative case.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
10. KIN TERMS AS VERBS
Samoan predicative kin terms do not necessarily have to be nouns; they may be the main
verb of the predicate as well. This chapter will go through some different Samoan
constructions involving kin terms as verbs, deal with kin verb semantics in general as well
as specifically for Samoan, and have a look at how TAM-categories are distributed in
connection with these verbs in Samoan.
10.1. Verbs and nouns
Nearly all Samoan kin terms may be used with a TAM-particle and thus function as the
verb head of the predicate, as exemplified by (77) below.
(77) 'e
te
tina"
'i
2.SG UNS be.mother to
le
pepe?
the
baby
'Are you the baby's mother?'
Kin terms are by no means unique among Samoan nouns in the ability to be used as verbs;
in fact, there are a great many words that can be used both as nouns and as verbs.29 This is
possible not only in Samoan (and other Polynesian languages) but in varying degrees in
quite a few languages, including English. The question whether these words should be
regarded as nouns, verbs, both or neither have been addressed frequently in the linguistic
literature (regarding Polynesian languages by for instance Pawley (1966b), Broschart
(1991), and Vonen (1988, 1991, 1993, 1994)), but I shall not take up that discussion here.
For the purposes of the present paper it will suffice to say that many Samoan "nouns" and
"verbs" are identical in phonetic realisation, whatever viewpoint one might have with
regards to their categorial status. I am referring to kin terms in distribution with TAM
particles as verbs, and to kin terms in other positions as nouns.
10.2. Samoan constructions involving kin verbs
Even if Samoan kin terms have the ability to stand as verbs, they do not often do so since
the nominal use of kin terms is the unmarked one, also in predication. As already noted,
only 5 out of 590 occurrences of kin terms in my text corpus (less than 1%) are verbs. But
even if used infrequently as verbs, there are quite a few kin terms that may function as the
29
According to Evans (forthcoming) a general noun-to-verb conversion possibility like this one would disqualify the Samoan kin term verbs from being what he calls 'pure kinship verbs'. This may be a justified viewpoint since Samoan, unlike most of the languages Evans (forthcoming) discusses, does not have a lexical set of
verbs expressing kinship that is distinct from the corresponding set of kin nouns. I shall therefore avoid using
his term 'kinship verbs' in the Samoan case. Since Samoan kin terms nonetheless may function as the main
verb of the predicate I will refer to them as 'kin verbs' or 'kin term verbs' in this paper. These terms are supposed to have a broader definition than Evans' term 'kinship verbs', and may be said to include his term as a
special case.
54
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
verb head of the predicate. The kin terms that sound most natural to my informant as verbs
seem to be the following:
• tama"
• tina"
• atali'i
• afafine
• tamatama
• tamateine
• uso
• tuafafine
• tuagane
• 'a"iga
• tei
'father'
'mother'
'son of a male'
'daughter of a male'
'son of a female'
'daughter of a female'
'same-sex-sibling'
'sister of male'
'brother of female'
'family'
'(younger) consanguineal
collateral relative'
There is, however, a certain construction in which nearly any kin term may be used as a
verb without straining the naturalness of the utterance too far in any given case. It has a
distinctly colloquial flavour about it, however, and is usually used only between close
friends. It is exemplified by (78) below.
(78) leaga
because
e
to'alua
tele
UNS be.spouse
much
'Because (he/she) is really a good husband/wife'
(Data, #18)
This construction is characterised by always having the same phrasing of words (apart from
the kin term, which may change), and by a rise in pitch and an increase in stress and
quantity of the stressed syllable of the kin term which is different from the natural
intonation pattern of a clause like (79) below, similar in structure.
(79) leaga
because
sa"
fa"nau
i
Asau
PAST.IM
be.born
in
VILLAGE
'Because (he/she) was born in Asau'
By virtue of being head of the predicate, Samoan kin verbs have a predicative use
semantically; they predicate a kin type to an argument of the clause. Referential or vocative
uses of kin verbs do not exist in Samoan. These uses may seem difficult to imagine at all
for verbs, but there are in fact languages in which such uses of kin verbs do exist through
the means of headless relative clauses (Evans, forthcoming). A referential use of a kin verb
is illustrated by the Australian Aboriginal language Iwaidja in (80) below.
IWAIDJA:
(80) &abi
1.SG
&a-
-bu' agbu-
1.ERG/3.ABS
-have.as.younger.sibling / be.older.sibling.to -PAST
-(
'My late younger sibling'
(lit. 'My (one such that) I had him as younger sibling';
or 'My (one such that) I was older sibling to him)
(Evans, forthcoming: derived from his example 27)
Another example may be taken from the Iroquoian language Cayuga where the terms
knó:ha', 'she is mother', and ha'nih, 'he is father' are verb roots inflected for a third person
55
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
subject. Similar to the Iwaidja example above, they may function as headless relative
clauses; '(the one such that) he is mother' and '(the one such that) he is father' respectively.
These terms are used both in reference and address (Sasse, 1998 [quoted in Evans,
forthcoming]). One may of course argue that the kin terms in these cases are still
predicative, by virtue of being verbs, and not referential or vocative, and that it is the zero
head of the phrase in which the kin term functions as a relative clause that performs the
referential or vocative function semantically. The view one adopts depends on whether one
accepts this zero head as a real and existing grammatical entity or not. The question need
not concern us here, however, since Samoan does not have these constructions.
Samoan kin verbs are intransitive since they cannot take transitive subjects, i.e.
arguments in the ergative case. Syntactically they follow the same pattern as other
intransitive verbs. But since kin relations involve (at least) two individuals, Samoan kin
verbs may sometimes take two arguments – one intransitive subject in form of an NP in the
absolutive case and one benefactive argument in form of a directional PP – which is shown
in (81) below. That the benefactive argument is optional is shown in (82).
(81) 'ole'a"
uso
FUT
matua
be.same.sex.sibling older
Letu'u
'i le
pepe 'ole'a"
fa"nau
mai
NAME.FEM
to the
baby FUT
be.born
here
'Letu'u will be older sister to the baby which will be born'
(82) 'o
PR
a'u
fo'i
1.SG also
'ole'a"
tina"
i le
masina fou
FUT
be.mother
in the
month
next
'Also I will be a mother next month'
(Data, #4)
Kin verbs in Samoan seem to occur more frequently without a benefactive argument than
with one. Only one of the five occurring kin term verbs in my text corpus was followed by a
benefactive argument (see example (83) below). The occurrences of kin verbs in the corpus
are of course too few to say anything by themselves, but they indicate a tendency which is
supported by the language intuitions of my informant.
As a matter of curious fact, the kin term verb 'a"iga, 'be family', may in a certain
construction take a benefactive argument which is not in the form of a directional PP. This
is when the benefactive argument is expressed by the relative pronoun e", 'those who'. (83) is
an illustration of this.
Ø
fa"nau
a
e"
ma"tou
te
'a"iga,
PR
SPEC.PL
off.spring
of
those.who
1.PL.EX
UNS
be.family
'ou
te
(83) 'O
1.SG UNS
ta'ua na"
'o
call
PR EM.PL
those
nai
o'u
tei
my
collateral.(younger.)relative
'The children of those we are family to, I call them my dear tei'
(Data, #4)
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
A directional PP may also, however, be added without violating the grammaticality of the
clause, as can be seen in (84) below. In this case, the anaphoric pronoun ai, of the
directional PP 'i ai, is co-referential with the benefactive argument e", 'those who'.
Ø
fa"nau
a
e"
ma"tou
PR
SPEC.PL
off.spring
of
those.who
1.PL.EX UNS
'ou
te
(84) 'O
1.SG UNS
ta'ua na"
'o
call
PR EM.PL
those
nai
te
'a"iga
'i
ai,
be.family
to
ANA
o'u
tei
my
collateral.(younger.)relative
'The children of those we are family to, I call them my dear tei'
This same behaviour occurs with some other intransitive verbs, like tafao, 'pay a visit', but
not with all intransitive verbs; not for instance with va'ai, 'look/see'. This can be seen from
the ungrammaticality of (85) (without a directional PP) and the grammaticality of (86) (with
a directional PP) below.
Ø
fa"nau
a
e"
PR
SPEC.PL
off.spring
of
those.who PAST.IM
e
popoto
i le
(85) *'O
sa"
ma"tou
va'ai
1.PL.EX
see
a'oga
UNS be.clever.PL in the
school
'The children of those we saw are clever in school'
(86) 'O
Ø
fa"nau
PR
SPEC.PL off.spring
e
popoto
i le
UNS be.clever.PL in the
a
e"
sa"
ma"tou
va'ai
'i
ai
of
those.who
PAST.IM
1.PL.EX
see
to
ANA
a'oga
school
'The children of those we saw are clever in school'
Other Samoan kin verbs (apart from 'a"iga, 'be family') obligatorily take a directional PP
with an anaphoric pronoun ai (like the verb va'ai, 'look/see', in example (86) above) when
used with a benefactive argument in form of the relative pronoun e", 'those who' (or the
singular equivalent le", 'he/she who'). Since 'a"iga, 'be family', follow the pattern of
intransitive verbs like tafao, 'pay a visit', while other kin verbs follow the pattern of
intransitive verbs like va'ai, 'look/see', we may conclude that, with regards to this particular
construction, kin verbs do not behave differently from other Samoan intransitive verbs.
10.3. Kin verb semantics
The meaning of a kin verb crosslinguistically does not necessarily have to be 'be K' as in the
Samoan examples above. Other possible meanings are 'treat in the way K usually does' and
'become K by causing <OBJECT> to exist'. Examples of these can be found in English, as is
shown by (87) and (88) below respectively.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(87) She really mothers her baby
(88) He fathered eleven children
These verbs include meanings beyond that of kinship relations. The verb 'mother' used as in
example (87) does not even have to include the component of kinship with regards to the
referent, since it can equally well be used in a sentence like The hospital nurses mothered
their patients. Even if the verb can, and sometimes does, denote an actual mother, it is
rather the social behaviour associated with a mother that is the main component here. For
the verb 'father' in example (88) the component of biological fatherhood has to be included
by necessity, but also here the main semantic component is another than that of the kinship
relation, viz. that with the meaning 'beget'. Thus, we may talk about a metaphoric extension
of the meaning of these kin terms in English.
Another possible meaning of kin term verbs is 'have as K', which is the opposite of 'be K'
in the sense that the anchor and referent roles of the kin relation are interchanged (recall the
way in which the terms 'anchor' and 'referent' are used with kin terms as predicative NPs
and verbs (see section 2.3)). For instance, if in a certain language a clause containing a kin
verb with the meaning 'be parents' translates as 'We are parents to them', then 'we' indicates
the referent and 'them' indicates the anchor of the kin relation expressed by 'be parents'. But
if the same clause contains a kin verb with the meaning 'have as parents', it translates as 'We
have them as parents', in which case 'we' indicates the anchor while 'them' indicates the
referent of the kin relation expressed by 'have as parents'. In the first case the subject
assumes the referent role, whereas in the second case the subject assumes the anchor role.
Unlike the meanings of the kin term verbs in the English examples in (87) and (88) above,
both the meanings 'have as K' and 'be K' can be said to involve only pure kinship
components.
Interestingly, Samoan kin verbs may be taken to mean either 'be K' or 'have as K'
depending on the situation. There are basically two factors that determine which meaning is
intended in a certain case: (i) syntactic structure, and (ii) discourse context. Looking at the
syntactic structure first, we see that if the kin verb is used without a benefactive argument,
it is always interpreted as 'be K', and the anchor of the kin relation is interpreted as an outof-focus anchor. (89) is an example of this.
(89) 'ole'a"
FUT
'ou
tama"
1.SG be.father
'I will be a father'
If, on the other hand, the kin verb is used together with a benefactive argument, the
discourse context comes into play. What is of significance is the identity of the individual
referred to by the NP within the benefactive PP of the kin verb. If this individual cannot be
expected to assume the referent role of the kin relation expressed by the kin term verb, the
verb will be interpreted as meaning 'be K', otherwise it will be interpreted as meaning 'have
as K'. In other words, one could say that 'have as K' is the default value of Samoan kin verbs
with benefactive arguments unless the context indicates otherwise. Cf. examples (90)-(91)
for illustrations of this.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(90) 'e
te
tina"
2.SG UNS be.mother
'i le
pepe?
'e
to the
baby
2.SG UNS be.mother
te
tina"
'ia"
ia?
to
3.SG
'Are you the mother of the baby? Are you her mother?'
(91) 'e
te
tina"
2.SG UNS have.as.mother
'i le
lo'omatua? 'e
to the
old.woman
te
tina"
2.SG UNS have.as.mother
'ia" ia?
to
3.SG
'Do you have that woman as your mother? Do you have her as your mother?'
In (90) tina" is taken to mean 'be mother', since le pepe, 'the baby', cannot possibly be a
mother and thus assume the referent role of the kin relation expressed by the verb, whereas
in (91) it is taken to mean 'have as mother' since le lo'omatua, 'the (old) woman', may very
well be a mother. Note that the second clauses of the examples above are identical but
translated differently due to the fact that the discourse context is different in the two
utterances.
It seems to be so that the 'be K'-interpretation is more easily accepted for the parental kin
terms, tina", 'mother', and tama", 'father', than for other kin terms used as verbs with
benefactive arguments. While my informant readily translated sentences like that in
example (90) above with a 'be K'-meaning for the verb, sentences like (92) below seemed to
be odd to my informant, though quite possible.
(92) ?e
UNS
tuagane
Falelua
'ia"
Melisa
be.brother.of.female
NAME.MASC
to
NAME.FEM
'Falelua is Melisa's brother'
Since the male, Falelua, is the subject of the clause, 'be K' is the only possible interpretation
of the verb; or the translation would result in the anomaly '(The male) Falelua has (the
female) Melisa as brother'.
Another meaning of the Samoan kin term verbs, apart from the two just discussed, does
occur under special circumstances. When used reflexively (i.e. when the anchor and the
referent is the same person), the verbs tina", 'be/have as mother', tama", 'be/have as father',
and uso matua, 'be/have as older same-sex-sibling', may have the metaphoric meaning 'treat
in the way K usually does' (like with the English verb 'mother'), as exemplified by (93)-(95)
below:
(93) e
tama"
ia
'ia"
ia
UNS be.father 3.SG to
lava
3.SG REFL
'He is his own father' (meaning 'He has to take care of himself';
biological father beeing absent, or neglecting his duties as a father)
(94) 'e
te
tina"
2.SG UNS be.mother
'ia"
'oe
lava
to
2.SG REFL
'You are your own mother'
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(95) 'ou
te
uso
matua"
1.SG UNS be.same.sex.sibling older
'ia"
a'u
lava
to
1.SG REFL
'I am my own big brother/sister'
It should be noted that any of these sentences may be used by both boys and girls; the verb
tina" (here 'treat like a mother does') is not reserved only for girls, and likewise, the verb
tama" (here 'treat like a father does') is not reserved only for boys. This means that, like for
the English verb 'mother', it is the social behaviour associated with the kin relation in
question that is the important semantic component, and not the kin relation itself. This
reflexive use is not all that uncommon according to my informant, but normally has a
jocular tone about it.
As a conclusion of the discussion about the semantics of Samoan kin verbs, it can be
said that they, when used without a benefactive argument, always have the meaning 'be K';
but when used together with a benefactive argument, they normally have the meaning 'have
as K', unless the context in which they occur indicate the contrary. There is also a reflexive
use of a few of the Samoan kin verbs which induces the meaning 'treat in the way K usually
does' in the verb. Also, the parental kin terms tina", 'be/have as mother', and tama", 'be/have
as father', stand out among kin terms used as verbs since they, when they occur with a
benefactive argument, more easily than other kin term verbs take on the meaning 'be K', and
since they (together with uso matua, 'be/have as older same-sex-sibling') may be used
reflexively.
10.4. Availability of TAM particles with kin verbs
The ability to be used with TAM particles is the criterion I have used to distinguish kin
verbs from kin nouns. But even if Samoan kin verbs may take the full range of TAM
particles, some of them seem to occur more frequently than others. In my text corpus the
only TAM particles used with kin verbs are e, indicating unspecified tense, and 'ole'a",
future tense. The kin verbs in my text corpus are too few (5 tokens) to constitute a base for
a firm generalisation, but examples provided by my informant seem to confirm that the
other core TAM particles in Samoan, sa", imperfective past, na, perfective past, 'ua,
inchoative perfect, and 'o lo'o, progressive present, do not appear as frequently with kin
terms. As we shall see, these latter four particles also entail a special interpretation of the
kin verb in question.
To begin with, (96) and (97) below are examples of kin terms with particles for future
tense and unspecified tense respectively.
(96) 'ole'a"
FUT
'ou
tama"
'i
1.SG be.father to
le
pepe
'ole'a"
fa"nau
mai
the
baby
FUT
be.born
here
'I will be father to the baby which will be born'
(97) e
tuafafine
UNS have.as.sister
Apelu
'ia" Leata
NAME.MASC
to
NAME.FEM
'Apelu has Leata as his sister'
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
In these examples, the kin verbs would normally indicate biological kinship. Even if it is
possible to use these clauses for people related non-biologically, for instance through
adoptive ties, the basic interpretation is that the verbs refer to a biological father and sister
respectively. This seems to apply in general for what can be regarded as nuclear
consanguineal kin terms, i.e. tama", 'father', tina", 'mother', atali'i, 'son of a male', afafine,
'daughter of a male', tamatama, 'son of a female', tamateine, 'daughter of a female', uso,
'same-sex-sibling', tuafafine, 'sister of male', and tuagane, 'brother of female', when they are
marked for unspecified tense and, in most cases, also when they are marked for future tense.
Interestingly, kin verbs marked for any of the categories imperfective past, perfective
past, inchoative perfect or progressive present are normally interpreted as indicating
adoptive or step kin ties, i.e. non-biological kinship. Cf. examples (98) to (101) below.
(98) sa"
PAST.IM
'ae
e
tina"
Lama
'ia" Ana
have.as.mother
NAME.MASC
to
le'i
while UNS not.yet
toe
alu
back go
ai
NAME.FEM
Lama
'i lona tina"
ANA NAME.MASC
to his
mo'i
mothertrue
'Lama had Ana as his (adoptive) mother before Lama went back to his real mother'
(99) na
PAST.PT
tama"
Va"
have.as.father NAME.FEM
'ia" Tui
'ae
e
to
while
UNS not.yet
NAME.MASK
le'i
oti
die
'Va had Tui as her (adoptive or step) father before (he) died'
(100) 'ua
INCH
tuagane
Mina
'i
le
tama 'ata
so'o
have.as.brother
NAME.FEM
to
the
boy
always
laugh
'Mina has come to have the boy (who is) always laughing as her (adoptive or
step) brother'
(101) 'o lo'o
PROG
tuafafine
Apelu
'ia" Leata
have.as.sister
NAME.MASC
to
NAME.FEM
'Apelu has Leata as his (adoptive or step) sister'
The interpretation of the kin verbs with markers for imperfective past and progressive
present as expressing non-biological kin ties (like in (98) and (101) respectively) can be
explained straight forwardly by the fact that they both express some variant of imperfective
aspect, i.e. a state that is going on at a certain time but may change at any time. This is not a
characteristic feature of biological kin ties but more likely applies to step or adoptive kin
ties. The reasons, however, why the kin verbs with markers for perfective past and
inchoative perfect ((99) and (100) respectively) tend to express non-biological kin ties
remain unclear.
Also kin verbs marked for future tense may indicate adoptive or step kin ties; namely
when used in utterances like 'I will have you as my older sister' where the speaker would
normally (i.e. biologically) already be involved in the kin relation predicated for the future
by the kin verb. An interpretation with biological kin ties would not make any sense here,
since it would imply that an unborn baby is the speaker.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
As we can see, the difference in interpretation that occurs from the use of different TAM
markers does not constitute a difference in the kin term semantics per se, but in the quality
of the referent. While the referent in both (97) and (101) above is a 'sister (of a male)', it is a
non biological sister in (101), i.e. a step sister or an adoptive sister, rather than a biological
sister.
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
11. KIN TERMS MODIFYING VERBS AND NOUNS
In this chapter, we will be concerned with zero-marked kin term NPs directly modifying
verbs or other nouns. By zero-marked kin terms, I mean those not marked by functional
markers, i.e. prepositions or case markers. Kin terms marked by prepositions may of course
also modify NP or VP heads, but such phrases will not be treated here.
11.1. Kin terms modifying verbs
Samoan verbs may be directly modified by nouns that characterise the event denoted by the
verb in the way exemplified by (102)-(104) below.
(102) E
ala
po"
UNS wake up night
lava
si
o'u
tama"
e
sa"uni
le
really EM.SG my
father
UNS prepare the
ti"
tea
'My dear father wakes up when it is still night to prepare the tea'
(Mosel/Hovdhaugen, 1992:394)
(103) E
tu"
UNS stand
matu
tele
north
much
'It stands (too) much to the north'
(About why Auckland could not become the capital of New Zealand)
(Mosel/Hovdhaugen, 1992:392)
(104) e
fai- -galue- -ga
UNS do
-work
-NR
Tone
i
le
fale
'ai-
-ga
NAME
in
SPEC.SG
house
eat
-NR
'Tone works in a restaurant'
In my text corpus, four different kin terms occur as such modifiers to verbs; 'a"iga, 'family',
uso, 'same-sex-sibling', ta"ne, 'husband', and a"va", 'wife'. (105)-(108) provide examples.
(105) 'O le
to'a- -tele
PR the HUM
o Ø
tagata o le
ma"tou 'a"iga 'ua
-greater.part of SPEC.PL person of the 1.PL
fai 'a"iga
family INCH do
family
'The majority of the people of our (extended) family have raised (their own) families'
(Data, #4)
(106) e
'au
uso
UNS form.a.team same.sex.sibling
Ø
teine
ia
e
to'a-
SPEC.PL
girl
these
UNS HUM
-lua
-be.two
'These two girls are sisters' (lit.: 'These girls who are two form a team of siblings')
(Data, #7)
(107) 'o
PR
le
isi
e
nofo
the
other
UNS stay
ta"ne
i Tulaele
husband in VILLAGE
'The other is married (and has moved to stay with her husband's family) in Tulaele
(Data, #4)
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Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
(108) e
fai
UNS do
a"va"
Siaosi
i le
'a"iga o
Tufuga
wife
NAME.MASC
in the
family of
NAME
'Siaosi is married (to a girl) in the Tufuga family'
(Data, #5)
These verb-noun constructions seem to be to a high degree lexicalised. Their meaning is not
always immediately derivable from the meaning of its components; out of a few possible
interpretations a specific one is chosen.30 These constructions are frequently also written as
one word in Samoan which indicate that they are perceived of as one unit.
While 'au uso, 'form a team of brothers/sisters', and nofo ta"ne, 'be married (said of a
male)' seem to be the only cases where the verbs 'au and nofo are modified by kin terms, the
verb fai, 'do', may combine with almost any individual kin term (as well as with 'a"iga,
'family', like in (105) above). Examples of this are (109) and (110) below.
(109) 'Ua
INCH
'ou
fia
tuafafine a"
fai
1.SG want do
sister
indeed
'I really want to have a sister'
(110) 'Ua
INCH
fai
fa"nau
'uma
Ø
do
children completely
o'u
SPEC.PL my
tuagane
brother
'All my brothers have children'
This is of course due to the fact that Samoan does not have a verb expressing the equivalent
of English 'have', and often employ the verb fai, 'do/make', in its place.
Another verb, su'e, 'look for', may also be modified by kin terms, but only those
designating a spouse, i.e. a"va", 'wife', ta"ne, 'husband' and to'alua, 'spouse'. (111) exemplifies.
(111) sa"
PAST.IM
su'e
ta"ne
mai le
look.for
huband here
tama'ita'i 'o
the lady
Sina
PR NAME
i Tutuila
in ISLAND
'The lady Sina looked for a husband on Tutuila'
The syntactic function of kin terms (and other nouns) used as modifiers to verbs are
difficult to determine. For instance, in (111) above, ta"ne, 'husband', cannot be an argument
of the verb su'e, 'look for', since it would then be interpreted as an argument in the
absolutative case by virtue of being zero-marked, and consequently, the subject, le
tama'ita'i 'o Sina, 'the lady Sina', would be rendered a transitive subject and would have to
stand in the ergative case, marked with e, which it does not. Also, ta"ne cannot be specified
by any NP articles and it cannot be combined with any demonstratives or possessive
pronouns, which would have been possible had it been an argument of the verb. The word
ta"ne may be thought of as an adverbial, which is how I have (provisionally) analysed kin
terms in these constructions in my text corpus. Somewhat similar cases are presented by
English phrases like 'make love' and 'make war', in which the syntactic function of the
30
In some cases the semantic properties of the noun and the verb in question only allow one interpretation.
64
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
constituents 'love' and 'war' is far from clear. Vonen (1988) analyses this kind of nouns in
Samoan as incorporated objects, as does Bauer (1993) for these nouns in Maori (another
Polynesian language). If we use the broader term noun incorporation (since these nouns are
not always "object-like" in Samoan), this may well be a valid analysis. It is not without
problems, however, since for instance the Samoan nominalizing suffix -ga and the
augmentative suffix -Cia may not be added after the entire construction but only after the
verb. This indicates that the verb-noun construction in these cases is not as tight as is
normal for constructions with incorporated objects (Vonen, 1988). Anward/Linell (1976)
describe the noun in Swedish verb-noun constructions similar to the Samoan ones discussed
here as object-like NP-modifiers in lexicalised phrases. As already mentioned, however,
these nouns does not necessarily have to be object-like in the Samoan cases; cf. for example
(102) and (103) above where they are clearly more adverbial-like than object-like.
Regardless of what syntactic function these NPs may have, however, their semantic use
is probably best rendered as predicative, since they supply additional information about the
character of the event denoted by the head of the predicate, i.e. the verb.
Since kin terms (and other nouns) modifying verbs cannot be combined with any
determiners they normally appear as bare nouns. They may, however, be combined with
further lexical items that modify the modifying noun, in which case they appear as
expanded nominals. (112) below is an example of this, where the verb su'e, 'look for', is
modified by the expanded nominal a"va" aulelei, 'beautiful wife', in which aulelei, 'beautiful',
modifies a"va", 'wife'.
(112) sa"
PAST.IM
su'e
a"va" aulelei Sa"nele
look.for
wife
beautiful
NAME
i Niu Sila
in COUNTRY
'Sanele looked for a beautiful wife in New Zealand'
The fact that nouns modifying verbs may be modified themselves, is another problem for
the noun incorporation analysis of these nouns discussed above, since incorporated nouns
tend to lack modifiers, articles, deictic elements, etc (Anderson, 1985).31
On the whole, kin terms as adverbial-like modifiers are not that common; in my text
corpus, 12 kin terms out of 590 (2%) were used this way. As we have seen, they also seem
restricted to a few lexicalised verb-NP constructions involving the verbs fai, 'do', 'au, 'form
a team', nofo, 'stay', and su'e, 'look for'.
We may end this section by resuming the fact that the properties shown by kin terms
modifying verbs seem to be shared by common nouns in general, and kin terms do not
receive special treatment in this regard.
31
There are, however, languages in which nouns analysed as incorporated nouns may be lexically modified,
e.g. Chukchee (a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language spoken in eastern Siberia) (Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, personal communication).
65
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
11.2. Kin terms modifying nouns
Samoan nouns may directly modify other nouns, indicating that the entity referred to by the
head noun in some way involves or concerns the entity referred to by the modifying noun,
as indicated by example (113).
(113) le
the
fale
moa
house
hen
'the hen house'
In my text corpus, there are only 8 tokens of kin terms modifying nouns, all of them
instances of the following three expressions: 'au uso, 'team of (same-sex) siblings', faiga
'a"iga, 'family ways', 'familyship', and fai a"va", 'married man (relative to his wife's
consanguineal kinsmen)'. (114)-(116) are examples of these.
(114) 'ua
INCH
nonofo
nei
le
'au
uso
teine 'i
stay.PL
now
the
team same.sex.sibling girl
le
with
uo"
tama
the pair.of.friends boy
'The sisters stayed with the two boys'
(lit.: 'The team of sisters stayed with the pair of friends (who were) boys')
(Data, #7)
(115) 'ua
INCH
alu alu
lava
le
fai- -ga
progress
indeed the do
-NR
uo"
lea
ma
le
fai- -ga 'a"iga ia
friend
DEM
and
the do
-NR family DEM
'This friendship and familyship developed'
(Data, # 7)
(116) 'O
Ioapo
fo'i
'o
le
fai
a"va"
o
le
ma"tou
PR
NAME
too
PR
the
do
wife
of
the
1.PL.EX family
'a"iga
'Ioapo too has married into our family'
(lit.: 'Ioapo too is a fai a"va" of our family')
The corresponding expression to fai a"va" for a female is nofo ta"ne, 'married woman (relative
to her husband's consanguineal kinsmen)'. This expression is not present as a nominal
expression in my text corpus, but (117) below is an illustration of its NP usage.
(117) E
agalelei le
UNS be.kind
nofo ta"ne
the stay
o
husband of
le
'a"iga o
the family of
Pula
NAME
'The woman who has married into the Pula family is kind'
(lit.: 'The nofo ta"ne of the family of Pula is kind')
It seems clear that both fai a"va" and nofo ta"ne are lexicalised expressions with fai, 'do',
and nofo, 'stay', respectively as their nuclei (cf. section 11.1). As already mentioned, many
Samoan words can be used both as nouns and as verbs, i.e. appear as head of both NPs and
VPs, without a change in phonetic realisation. The expressions fai a"va" and nofo ta"ne are
typically used as verbal expressions, in which case the modifying kin term functions as an
66
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
adverbial-like constituent (again cf. section 11.1), but they may also be used as nominal
expressions (as in (116) and (117) above), in which case the modifying kin term may be
seen as an attribute. In the case of faiga 'a"iga, 'familyship', its nucleus faiga, 'style',
'treatment', is a nominalization derived from fai, 'do', by the nominalizing suffix -ga. Thus,
it can only occur as a nominal expression and the modifying kin term 'a"iga, 'family', must
then be seen as an attribute to the head noun.
The expression 'au uso, 'team of (same-sex) siblings', is a bit different from the other
three discussed here. It is typically used as a nominal expression (as in (114) above), though
it is also possible to use it as a verbal expression (as in (106) in section 11.1). From a
syntactic point of view, its internal structure is identical to that of the other three
expressions, i.e. a head ('au, 'team') plus an attributive modifying kin term (uso, 'same-sex
sibling'). However, since 'au, 'team', merely introduces a unit of measure while uso, 'samesex sibling', carries the semantic weight of the NP, it is not so obvious, from a semantic
point of view, that the former should be regarded as the head of the NP; perhaps the latter is
a better candidate. The case is the same with a number of other nouns filling a quantifying
function, but occupying the syntactic position of the NP head in Samoan, e.g. fuifui, 'bunch',
lafu, 'herd', mau, 'abundance', pauna, 'pound', and fagu, 'bottle', as in fuifui moli, 'bunch of
oranges', lafu pua'a, 'herd of pigs', mau tagata, 'abundance of people', pauna lialia, 'pound
of noodles', and fagu pia, 'bottle of beer'. These are all nouns indicating collections,
measures, or containers which are words that in many languages may appear as quantifiers
rather than NP heads, not only semantically but also morphosyntactically (as discussed by
Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming)). And in fact, in some other Polynesian languages
cognates of the Samoan words mentioned above has been grammaticalized as plural
markers, like Tahitian mau (Fare Vana'a, 1986), Hawaiian mau (Alexander, 1968),
Tongarevan au (Clark, 1976) and Rarotongan au (Krupa, 1982). However, Samoan 'au,
'team', as well as the other nouns that may function semantically as quantifiers in NPs, are
best regarded as NP heads syntactically – if they are not, a following noun would have to be
the head and these quantifiers would thus precede their head, which is a very peculiar
position for any modifier in a Samoan NP. More typical quantifiers follow the NP head, for
instance like 'a"toa, 'whole', in le o"laga 'a"toa, 'the whole life', and 'uma, 'all', in tama 'uma,
'all the boys'.32
Kin terms – as well as other nouns modifying nouns – may in some cases themselves be
modified internally, like in (118) below.
(118) 'o lo'o
PROG
lama
le
'au
fish.by.night
the team
uso
tama i
le
same.sex.sibling
boy
the sea
in
sami
'The brothers are fishing by night in the sea'
As for determiners, it seems they cannot combine with kin terms modifying other nouns,
i.e. these kin terms – like nouns in general modifying other nouns – appear either as bare
nouns (as in (115)-(117) above) or expanded nominals (as in (118) above), however not
32
The word 'uma, 'all', is a so called floating quantifier; it may occur outside the NP the head of which it is
quantifying. When used within an NP, however, it must always follow the head.
67
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
proper-name-like. However, it is sometimes not clear whether the demonstrative ia is
determining the modifying noun or the modified noun. Consider example (119) below.
(119) 'o
PR
le
'au
uso
teine
ia
the
team
same.sex.sibling
girl
DEM
'these sisters'
(Data, #7)
The word ia is normally used, when postposed to the NP head, as a plural demonstrative,
and ia in example (119) may appear to determine uso teine, 'sister' (or even only teine,
'girl'). If that is the case, then nouns modifying other nouns actually may combine with
determiners, and the modifier uso teine above could not be considered an expanded
nominal, but rather a full NP. However, according to Mosel/Hovdhaugen (1992), a
postposed ia may also be a singular demonstrative if used together with a preposed singular
definite article, le, as in (120) below.33
(120) 'o
PR
le
mea
ia
the
thing
DEM
'That thing'
(Mosel/Hovdhaugen, 1992:132)
Therefore I am inclined to regard le...ia in both the above examples as a singular
demonstrative determining the NP 'au uso teine, 'team of sisters' in the former case. Such an
analysis allows us to make the generalisation that zero-marked NPs modifying other nouns
may never combine with determiners, which is consistent with the situation for zeromarked NPs modifying verbs (see section 11.1).
Summing up this section, we may reflect that kin terms modifying nouns does in no way
behave differently than other common nouns functioning as modifiers in NPs.
33
According to my informant, however, this construction is very infrequently used.
68
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
12. CONCLUDING DISCUSSION
In this study, a number of aspects of kin term usage in Samoan have been reviewed and
some of the grammatical properties of Samoan kin terms have been mapped. Both nominal
and verbal usages of kin terms have been taken into account and compared to the use of
other nouns and verbs.
On the whole, Samoan kin terms seem to be well integrated into the Samoan
grammatical system, and behave much like other common nouns and other intransitive
verbs. This is evident in their nominal use for instance from the facts that they seldomly
appear as proper-name-like bare nouns, that they do not trigger special possessive
constructions, and that when they appear as modifiers to verbs or nouns they do not differ
from other modifying nouns in any way. It is also evident in their verbal use from the fact
that they follow the same syntactic patterns as other intransitive verbs.
As we have seen in this paper, however, there are some cases where Samoan kin term
nouns have grammatical properties that differ from those of common nouns. These
properties group kin terms together with proper names and pronouns rather than with
common nouns. In particular, we have seen that some kin terms may under some
circumstances indeed be used as bare nouns (or expanded nominals) in a proper-name-like
way, as indicated in table 16 below.
Table 16: Proper-name-like bare noun uses of Samoan kin terms
Samoan kin terms may appear as bare nouns...
(i) when used vocatively;
(ii) when used in locative/directional PPs (in which case the preposition
appears as either of the proprial variants ia", 'in', or 'ia", 'to'); and
(iii) when used predicatively together with the verbs ta'ua, 'call', and
fa'aigoa, 'call'.
However, the bare noun proper-name-like use is optional (and quite infrequent) in all of the
above cases.
As for differences among kin terms internally, this paper has shown that the parental
prototype suggested by Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (forthcoming) is reinforced by Samoan,
since, in a number of cases, Samoan parental kin terms (excluding the unisex term matua,
'parent') stand out among kin terms with respect to their grammatical properties, both in
their nominal and their verbal uses. Especially the points in table 17 below have been noted.
69
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
Table 17: Some differences between parental terms and other kin terms in Samoan
• Vocative bare noun kin terms tend to be parental terms rather than
any other kin terms
• Bare noun kin terms in locative/directional PPs tend to be parental
terms rather than any other kin terms
• Predicative bare noun kin terms with the verbs ta'ua, 'call', and
fa'aigoa, 'call', are exclusively parental terms
• Parental kin verbs with a benefactive argument take on the meaning
'be K' instead of the "default value" 'have as K' more easily than other
kin verbs with a benefactive argument
• The reflexive use of kin verbs ('be my own K') is limited to the
parental terms tina", 'be/have as mother', and tama", 'be/have as father',
and the sibling term uso matua, 'be/have as older same-sex-sibling'
In connection with the parental prototype, also Greenberg's (1966) markedness hierarchies
for kin terms (supported in full by Samoan) deserve comment, since they in a way say the
same thing as the parental prototype, but with a different approach. Weighed together, those
of Greenberg's (1966) markedness hierarchies discussed in this paper define consanguineal
ascending lineal kin terms with a small generational distance between the anchor and the
referent as the least marked kin terms. Obviously, parental kin terms fit this definition
perfectly.
A difference between the standard (adult) language parental terms tina", 'mother', and
tama", 'father', on the one hand, and the child language parental terms mama, 'mom', and
papa, 'dad', on the other, has also been noted in this paper. While a proper-name-like bare
noun use is possible but uncommon and somewhat marked for the former two, such a use is
normal and unmarked for the latter two.
In conclusion then, being very concise, we may answer the questions we set out to
answer in this paper (somewhat simplified below) in the following way:
Are Samoan kin terms different from other nouns – and verbs – in the language,
grammatically?
Usually not, but sometimes and in some ways.
Are there any internal differences in usage between Samoan kin terms?
Yes, parental terms often receive special grammatical treatment.
70
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
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base') (appendix to: Marck, Jeff. 1996a. Kin terms in the Polynesian protolanguages; the appendix is
available through URL: <http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~marck/kinship.htm> [last accessed January 28th,
1999]). Canberra. Australian National University
Mead, Margaret. 1969 (1930). Social organization of Manua (in series: Bernice P. Bishop Museum
Bulletin, no 160). Honolulu. Bernice P. Bishop Museum
Merlan, Francesca. 1982. 'Egocentric' and 'altercentric' usage of kin terms in MaΝ
Νarayi (in:
Heath, J. / Merlan, F. / Rumsey, A. (editors). The languages of kinship in aboriginal Australia,
pp 125-140). Sydney. The University of Sydney
Merlan, Francesca / Heath, Jeffrey. 1982. Dyadic kinship terms (in: Heath, J. / Merlan, F. / Rumsey, A.
(editors). The languages of kinship in aboriginal Australia, pp 107-124). Sydney. The University of
Sydney
72
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
Milner, G.B. 1966. Samoan dictionary. Auckland. Polynesia Press
Morgan, L.H. 1870. Systems of consanguinity and affinity (in series: Smithonian Institution Contributions
to Knowledge, vol 17, no 218). Washington. Smithonian Institution
Mosel, Ulrike / Hovdhaugen, Even. 1992. Samoan reference grammar. Oslo. Scandinavian University
Press
Mufwene, S.S. 1988. The pragmatics of kinship terms in Kituba (in: Multilingua, vol 7, pp 441-453).
Berlin. Mouton de Gruyter
Murdock, George P. 1947. Bifurcate merging (in: American Anthropologist, vol 49, pp 59-69). Washington.
American Anthropological Association
Murdock, George P. 1949. Social structure. New York. Macmillan
Murdock, George P. 1959. Cross-language parallels in parental kin terms (in: Anthropological linguistics,
vol 1, pp 1-5). Bloomington. Indiana University
Murdock, George P. 1970. Kin term patterns and their distribution (in: Ethnology, vol 9, pp 165-207).
Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh
Nerlove, Sarah / Romney, Kimball. 1967. Sibling terminology and cross-sex behaviour (in: American
Anthropologist, vol 69, pp 179-187). Washington. American Anthropological Association
Nichols, Johanna. 1988. On alienable and inalienable possession (in: Shipley, W. (editor). In honor of
Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference on native American linguistics, pp 557-609). Berlin.
Mouton de Gruyter
Pawley, Andrew. 1966a. Polynesian languages, a subgrouping based on shared innovations in
morphology (in: Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol 75, pp 39-64). Wellington. Polynesian
Society
Pawley, Andrew K. 1966b. Samoan phrase structure (in: Anthropological Linguistics, vol 8, no 5, part I,
pp 1-63). Bloomington. Indiana University
Pericliev, Vladimir / Valdes-Perez, Raul E. 1998. Automatic componential analysis of kinship semantics
with a proposed structural solution of multiple solutions (in: Anthropological Linguistics, vol 40,
pp 272-317). Bloomington. Indiana University
Pratt, George. 1984 (reprint of the 3rd edition from 1893). A grammar and dictionary of the Samoan
language. Papakura. McMillan
Romney, A.K. / d'Andrade, R.G. 1964. Cognitive aspects of English kin terms (in: American
Anthropologist, vol 66, no 3, part 2, pp 146-170). Washington. American Anthropological
Association
Rumsey, Alan. 1982. Gun-Gunma: An Australian aboriginal avoidance language and its social
functions (in: Heath, J. / Merlan, F. / Rumsey, A. (editors). The languages of kinship in aboriginal
Australia, pp 160-181). Sydney. The University of Sydney
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen 1998. Verwandtschaftsverben im Cayuga [Kinship verbs in Cayuga] (unpublished
handout dated May 12, 1998). Istitut für Sprachwissenschaft. University of Cologne
Schebeck, B. 1973. The Adnjamathanha personal pronoun and the 'Wailpi kinship system' (in:
Schebeck, B / Hercus, L.A. / White, I.M. (contributors). Papers in Australian linguistics: no 6).
Canberra. Australian National University Press
Schusky, Ernest L. 1983 (second edition). Manual for kinship analysis. Lanham & New York &
London. University Press of America
Stanner, W.E.H. 1937. Aboriginal modes of address and reference in the north-west of the Northern
Teritory (in: Oceania, vol 7, pp 300-315). Sydney. The University of Sydney
Sutton, Peter. 1982. Personal power, kin classification and speech ettiquette in aboriginal Australia
(in: Heath, J. / Merlan, F. / Rumsey, A. (editors). The languages of kinship in aboriginal Australia,
pp 182-200). Sydney. The University of Sydney
Vonen, Arnfinn M. 1988. The noun phrase in Samoan and Tokelauan. Oslo. University of Oslo
Vonen, Arnfinn M. 1991. Nouns or verbs in Tokelauan? (in: Sigurðsson, H.A. (editor). Papers from the
twelfth Scandinavian Conference of linguistics, pp 449-460). Reykjavík. University of Iceland
73
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
Vonen, Arnfinn M. 1993. Parts of speech and linguistic typology. Open classes and conversion in
Russian and Tokelau (doctoral dissertation). Oslo. University of Oslo
Vonen, Arnfinn M. 1994. Multifunctionality and morphology in Tokelau and English (in: Nordic Journal
of Linguistics, vol 17, pp 155-178). Oslo. Scandinavian University Press
Wallace, A.F.C. / Atkins, J. 1960. The meaning of kinship terms (in: American Anthropologist, vol 62,
pp 58-80). Washington. American Anthropological Association
Wilson, William H. 1982. Proto-Polynesian possessive marking (in series: Pacific Linguistics, series B,
no 85). Canberra. Australian National University Press
Wu, Yongyi. 1990. The usage of kinship address forms amongst non-kin in Mandarin Chinese: the
extension of family solidarity (in: Australian Journal of Linguistics, vol 10, pp 61-88). St Lucia.
Australian Linguistic Society
Personal communication:
Megyesi, Beáta. Department of Linguistics, University of Stockholm
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. Department of Linguistics, University of Stockholm
Indirect references
Collection volumes (cited in the list of direct references above):
Dahl, Ö. / Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M. (editors). Forthcoming. The circum-Baltic languages: Their typology
and contacts
Haukioja, Timo (editor). 1998. Papers from the 16th Scandinavian conference of Linguistics. Turku.
Åbo Akademis tryckeri
Heath, J. / Merlan, F. / Rumsey A. (editors). 1982. Languages of kinship in Aboriginal Australia (in series:
Oceania Linguistic Monographs, no 24). Sydney. University of Sydney
Herslund, M. (editor). Forthcoming. Different Approaches to Possession. Amsterdam/Philadelphia. John
Benjamins
Jakobson, Roman (editor). 1962. Phonological studies (in series: Selected writings, vol 1). The Hague.
Mouton
Maquet, J. (editor). 1980. On linguistic anthropology: Essays in honor of Harry Hoijer. Malibu. Udena
Publications
Pawley, A. / Carrington, L. (editors). 1985. Austronesian linguistics at the 15th Pacific Science Congress
(in series: Pacific Linguistics, series C, no 85). Canberra. Australian National University Press
Schebeck, B / Hercus, L.A. / White, I.M. (contributors). 1973. Papers in Australian linguistics: no 6
(in series: Pacific Linguistics, series A, no 36). Canberra. Australian National University Press
Shopen, Timothy (editor). 1985. Language typology and syntactic description, vol 3. Cambridge.
Cambridge University Press
Seiler, H. / Premper, W. (editors). 1991. Partizipation. Das sprachliche Erfassen von Sachverhalten
[Participation. The linguistic understanding of state of affairs] (in series: Language Universals, vol 6).
Tübingen. Gunter Narr Verlag
Shipley, W. (editor). 1988. In honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference on native
American linguistics. Berlin. Mouton de Gruyter
Sigurðsson, H.A. (editor). 1991. Papers from the twelfth Scandinavian Conference of linguistics.
Reykjavík. University of Iceland
74
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
APPENDIX A
The translation of the kin terms below has been made primarily with the help of my
informant, but also through consulting Mead (1969 [1930]), Milner (1966) and Marck
(1996b). The list includes all commonly used present day Samoan kin terms, and also some
polite kin terms (of which Samoan has quite a few) and older kin terms not in frequent use
today. In the translations, different meanings of the same word have been numbered 1, 2, 3,
etc; while closely related yet different meanings have been labelled a, b, c, etc.
afafine
'a"iga
alo
atali'i
a"va"
fa"nau
feagaiga
gafa
ila"mutu
mama
matua
ma"tua
ma'upu"
paolo
papa
suli
tama
tama"
tamafafine
tamatama
tamata"ne
tamateine
ta"ne
tei
tina"
to'alua
daughter of a male
family (nuclear or extended depending on the context)
off-spring (polite term)
son of a male
wife
1. off-spring (collective reference only) 2. birth 3.a. give birth b. be
born
1. reciprocal term between tamata"ne and tamafafine or between
brothers and sisters (usually used though by males about
females; archaic term) 2. promise (noun)
consanguineal kin (collecive reference only)
sister of any male lineal ancestor of a male anchor connected to him
via male ties only (archaic term)
mum, mother (child language)
1. parent 2. old
[plural of matua 1.]
male's sister's child (archaic term)
affinal relatives (collective reference only)
dad, father (child language)
1. descendant (polite term) 2. heir (polite term)
1. off-spring of female or couple 2. child (not in the sense of
off-spring) 3. boy
father
descendant of a male's sister, the male or any of his descendants being
the anchor (archaic term)
son of a female
descendant of a female's brother, the female or any of her descendants
being the anchor (archaic term)
daughter of a female
husband
consanguineal collateral relative of the same generation as anchor or a
descending generation; the term can also be used reciprocally
between all consanguineal collateral relatives as long as the referent
is under the age of about thirty or so
mother
spouse
75
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
tua'a"
tuafafine
tuafa"fine
tuagane
tupu'aga
tupuga
uso
parent (polite term) – SEE COMMENT BELOW
sister of a male
[plural of tuafafine]
brother of a female
ancestors (usually collective reference; polite term)
1. ancestors (usually collective reference; polite term) 2. originate
sibling of same sex
Comment:
There seems to be some confusion about whether the term tua'a" means 'parent' or 'sibling of
same sex' (i.e. synonymous with the term uso). Marck (1996b) suggests that the difference
in meaning can be attributed to dialect differences between Western and American Samoa.
My informant (who is from Western Samoa) strongly claims that tua'a" is the polite word
for 'parent' used in Western Samoa. This is also verified by other Western Samoan speakers
that I have consulted. Pratt (1984 [1893; quoted in Marck, 1996b]), however, claims that
tua'a" is the Western Samoan word for 'sibling of same sex'.
Mead (1969 [1930]), Danielsson (1953), and Milner (1966) describe the situation in
American Samoa, and they all have different opinions about the meaning of the word tua'a".
Mead (1969 [1930]) claims, like Pratt (1984 [1893]), that tua'a" means 'sibling of same sex',
while Danielsson (1953) specifies the term to mean 'senior sibling of same sex'. Milner
(1966), however, says that it is the polite word for 'parent'.
Since we find both meanings ('parent' and 'sibling of same sex') in both language areas
(Western and American Samoa) the difference may not be dialectal, but rather diachronic
with a shift in meaning from '(senior) sibling of same sex' to 'parent' (consider the
publishing dates of the works mentioned above). Wilson (1982) proposes a meaning 'senior
sibling of same sex' for his reconstructed Proto-Polynesian form *tuakana, the etymon of
Samoan tua'a", which supports such a development.
76
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
APPENDIX B
Kin terms taking o-marked possessors:
afafine
'a"iga
alo
atali'i
gafa
ila"mutu
mama
matua
ma'upu"
paolo
papa
suli
tama"
tei
tina"
to'alua
tua'a"
tuafafine
tuagane
tupu'aga
tupuga
uso
daughter of a male
family
off-spring (polite)
son of a male
consanguineal kin (collecive reference only)
sister of father or father's father or father's father's father etc [also in a-constructions?]
mum, mother (child language) – SEE REMARK BELOW
parent
male's sister's child (archaic) [also in a-constructions?]
affinal relatives (collective reference only)
dad, father (child language) – SEE REMARK BELOW
descendant (polite)
father
consanguineal collateral relative of the same generation as anchor or a descending generation
mother
spouse
parent (polite)
sister of a male
brother of a female
ancestors (usually collective reference; polite)
ancestors (usually collective reference; polite)
sibling of same sex
Kin terms taking a-marked possessors:
a"va"
fa"nau
feagaiga
tama
tamafafine
tamatama
tamata"ne
tamateine
ta"ne
wife
off-spring (collective reference only)
reciprocal term between tamata"ne and tamafafine or between brothers and sisters (archaic)
off-spring of female or couple
descendant of a male's sister, the male or any of his descendants being the anchor (archaic)
son of a female
descendant of a female's brother, the female or any of her descendants being the anchor (archaic)
daughter of a female
husband
Remark:
Regarding the child language terms mama, 'mum', and papa, 'dad', as possessees, my
informant is a little uncertain about which possessive construction to use, though she seems
to prefer the construction with o-marked possessors. The reason why the a/o-distinction is
perhaps a bit blurred with these terms is probably because they seldomly appear in
possessive constructions at all (particularly not in constructions with possessive pronouns
since they tend to appear determinerless (see section 6.3)), and also because they are mostly
used by children, who may not yet master the a/o-distinction.
77
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
APPENDIX C
The total number of occurrences of kin terms in the text corpus (ordered alphabetically):
KIN TERM
afafine
'a"iga
alo
atali'i
a"va"
fa"nau
feagaiga
gafa
ilamutu
mama
matua
ma'upu"
paolo
papa
suli
tama
tama"
tamafafine
tamatama
tamata"ne
tamateine
ta"ne
tei
tina"
to'alua
tua'a"
tuafafine
tuagane
tupu'aga
tupuga
uso
TOTAL
Genealo Narrati Convers Letters
gy
ve
ation
Song
lyrics
Inormat
ion
TOTAL
10
1
0
0
0
0
11
49
3
1
16
7
0
76
0
0
0
1
0
0
1
12
2
0
1
0
0
15
9
1
0
1
0
0
11
47
5
0
5
1
0
58
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
3
0
0
0
0
0
3
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
4
0
4
51
1
0
4
1
0
57
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
0
0
0
0
0
2
0
0
0
0
3
0
3
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
10
0
0
1
0
0
11
60
0
0
3
0
0
63
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
7
1
0
0
0
0
8
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
11
0
0
0
0
0
11
15
0
0
0
0
0
15
11
0
0
4
0
0
15
65
1
1
10
7
0
84
7
3
0
10
0
0
20
0
0
2
0
0
0
2
12
0
1
0
0
0
13
30
0
1
1
0
0
32
1
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
51
5
5
13
0
0
74
463
23
11
70
23
0
590
78
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
The total number of occurrences of kin terms in the text corpus (ordered by number):
tina"
'a"iga
uso
tama"
fa"nau
matua
tuagane
to'alua
ta"ne
atali'i
tei
12. tuafafine
13. a"va"
afafine
tama
tamateine
17. tamatama
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
84
76
74
63
58
57
32
20
15
15
15
13
11
11
11
18. mama
19. papa
4
gafa
21. paolo
tua'a"
23. alo
tupu'aga
25. feagaiga
ilamutu
ma'upu"
suli
tamata"ne
tamafafine
tupuga
TOTAL
3
11
8
79
3
2
2
1
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
590
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
APPENDIX D
The sources of data used as text corpus are indicated below. Every source text has received
a number, and this number is given as a reference whenever language examples taken from
the text corpus are presented in the paper.
GENEALOGICAL TEXTS:
1:
Transcription of recording
Va'ai Andersson when asked to speak about her family
Recorded in February, 1999
2:
Transcription of recording
Aiga Jonsson when asked to speak about her family
Recording date: January 26, 1999
3:
Transcription of recording
Aiga Jonsson when asked to speak about her relatives
Recording date: January 26, 1999
4:
Transcription of recording
Aiga Jonsson when asked to speak about her family and friends
Recording date: January 26, 1999
5:
Transcription of recording
Aiga Jonsson when asked to speak about her family
Recording date: January 29, 1999
6:
Official web-page
O au o Sueina Ryan ('I am Sueina Ryan')
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Shores/1936/main.html>
Author: Sueina Ryan
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
NARRATIVE:
7:
Transcription of recording
Aiga Jonsson telling a story about two boys and their proffessions
Recording date: January 26, 1999
COMMUNICATION ON INTERNET FORUMS:
8:
Extract from message posted to O le leo o tagata ('The voice of the people')
URL: <http://polycafe.com/leotagata/leotagata.html>
Sent by: SOLE
Date: Tuesday, December 29, 1998 at 00:38:15
Accessed January 28th, 1999
80
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
9:
Extract from message posted to O le leo o tagata ('The voice of the people')
URL: <http://polycafe.com/leotagata/leotagata.html>
Sent by: PHILLIP IAFETA SEMU SEGA
Date: Friday, November 6, 1998 at 15:41:42
Accessed January 28th, 1999
10:
Extract from message posted to The Polynesian Cafe
URL: <http://polycafe.com/cafepatio.htm>
Sent by: "iss me, your cuzzin from O'SIDE....once again..."
Date: January 23, 1999 at 13:23:50
Accessed January 28th, 1999
11:
Extract from message posted to The Polynesian Cafe
URL: <http://polycafe.com/cafepatio.htm>
Sent by: P. [Peleitumua]
Date: February 06, 1999 at 15:42:45
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
12:
Extract from message posted to O le leo o tagata ('The voice of the people')
URL: <http://polycafe.com/leotagata/leotagata.html>
Sent by: Peacemaker
Date: Monday, February 1, 1999 at 19:07:54
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
13:
Extract from message posted to Kamehameha Roundtable
URL: <http://polycafe.com/kamehameha/kamehamehaF.shtml>
Sent by: Bevo
Date: November 03, 1997 at 15:35:23
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
14:
Extract from message posted to Kamehameha Roundtable
URL: <http://polycafe.com/kamehameha/kamehamehaF.shtml>
Sent by: Pasi o le Va'a
Date: November 03, 1997 at 19:01:44
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
15:
Extract from message posted to Kamehameha Roundtable
URL: <http://polycafe.com/kamehameha/kamehamehaF.shtml>
Sent by: Bevo
Date: November 04, 1997 at 21:03:57
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
16:
Extract from message posted to Kamehameha Roundtable
URL: <http://polycafe.com/kamehameha/kamehamehaF.shtml>
Sent by: Pasi o le Va'a
Date: November 05, 1997 at 18:34:36
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
81
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
PERSONAL LETTERS:
17:
Letter written February 2, 1997
18:
Letter written February 2, 1997
19:
Letter written April 19, 1997
20:
Letter written September 25, 1997
21:
Letter written October 13, 1997
22:
Letter written October 15, 1997
23:
Letter written March 7, 1998
24:
Letter written May 26, 1998
25:
Letter written November 29, 1998
26:
Note written in March, 1999
SONG LYRICS:
27:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Musika Malie
Band: The Five Stars
Year: 1984
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
28:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Pepe Siva
Band: The Five Stars
Year: 1986
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
29:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Tele I'a O Le Sami
Band: The Five Stars
Year: 1980
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
82
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
30:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Seu O Le Pologa
Band: Le La Oso Band
Year: 1998
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
31:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Sosefina
Band: Le La Oso Band
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
32:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Taute Lo'u Au 2
Band: Le La Oso Band
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
33:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Avatu Mo Oe
Band: Punialava'a (Rev. Iosefa Lale Peteru)
Year: 1992
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
34:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Fa'amavaega
Band: Punialava'a (Rev. Iosefa Lale Peteru)
Year: 1992
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
35:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: O Le Mau
Band: Punialava'a (Rev. Iosefa Lale Peteru)
Year: 1992
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
36:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Oute Le Tala Ole
Band: Punialava'a (Rev. Iosefa Lale Peteru)
Year: 1992
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
83
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
37:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Pei O Auma
Band: Punialava'a (Rev. Iosefa Lale Peteru)
Year: 1992
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
38:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Si Fe'e
Band: Punialava'a (Rev. Iosefa Lale Peteru)
Year: 1992
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
39:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Aumaia Lou Alofa
Band: RSA Band
Year: 1996
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
40:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Diana
Band: RSA Band
Year: 1997
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
41:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Lamepa
Band: RSA Band
Year: 1997
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
42:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Nofo I Salafai
Band: RSA Band
Year: 1996
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
43:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Taimi Nei Taeao
Band: RSA Band
Year: 1996
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
84
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
44:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Tina
Band: RSA Band
Year: 1996
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
45:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Dear Ea?
Band: Samoa Sisters
Year: 1998
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
46:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Ma'a Soama
Band: Samoa Sisters
Year: 1998
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
47:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Tali Maia
Band: Samoa Sisters
Year: 1998
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
48:
Song lyrics from the Samoan Lyrics Scene by Charr Starr
URL: <http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9769/samoa/samoa.html>
Song: Fia Va'ai Atu E Ua 'E Sau
Band: Y-Not Band
Year: 1995
Accessed Feb 11, 1999
49:
Lyrics to a traditional children’s song
Song: Talofa pepe
Related by Aiga Jonsson
Date: March 19, 1999
INFORMATIVE WEB-PAGES:
50:
Official web-page
U.S. House of Representatives Documents, American Samoa, What's new
URL: <http://www.house.gov/faleomavaega/nsamlcu.htm>
Author: U.S. Congressman Faleomavaega (American Samoa)
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
85
Niklas Jonsson: SOME GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF SAMOAN KIN TERMS
51:
Official web-page
U.S. House of Representatives Documents, American Samoa, What's new
URL: <http://www.house.gov/faleomavaega/nsamgrnt.htm>
Author: U.S. Congressman Faleomavaega (American Samoa)
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
52:
Official web-page
Uiga i le Manumea [About Manumea] (an introduction to the Manumea Society)
URL: <http://194.236.196.230/Manumea/MRegistration.nsf/Home/AboutW>
Author: Aiga Jonsson [inofficially]
Accessed Feb 9, 1999
86