Stephen C. Levinson A Grammar of Yélî Dnye Pacific Linguistics Managing editor Alexander Adelaar Editorial board members Wayan Arka Danielle Barth Don Daniels T. Mark Ellison Bethwyn Evans Nicholas Evans Gwendolyn Hyslop David Nash Bruno Olsson Bill Palmer Andrew Pawley Malcolm Ross Dineke Schokkin Jane Simpson Volume 666 Stephen C. Levinson A Grammar of Yélî Dnye The Papuan Language of Rossel Island The publication was financially supported by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands ISBN 978-3-11-073847-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-073385-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-073390-7 ISSN 1448-8310 DOI https://10.1515/9783110733853 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952050 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Stephen C. Levinson, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published open access at www.degruyter.com Photo credit: Stephen C. Levinson, Boys fishing off the North coast of Rossel Island Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Dedicated to the memory of Isidore Yidika Wombodo tp:oo The late Yidika Wombodo tp:oo, principal consultant, with the author, Christmas 2001 Preface Rossel Island has a certain fame despite its small size, small population and remote location. First, in anthropology it is well known as the home of an indig- enous money system of unrivalled complexity. Malinowksi had hoped to work there, but the First World War put him under closer observation on the Trobri- ands. How different the history of anthropology might have been had he been placed amongst the Rossels, puritans, economists and philosophers of the Louisi- ades, instead of among the light-hearted, competitive, hierarchical Trobrianders. His linguistic gifts would certainly have put the language on the map. Instead, a remarkable ethnographer, later to be a professor of economics, Wallace E. Armstrong worked there in 1921, and published an ethnography which is quite extraordinary given the three odd months of fieldwork on which it was based. This highlighted the highly-developed indigenous shell-money system – since then a Danish anthropologist John Liep (2009) has corrected the record with a full-length monograph of his own. Neither of these anthropologists broke the lan- guage code. For the island has a second claim to fame: the Rossel language Yélî Dnye is renowned throughout Milne Bay Province as bizarre and unlearnable, so that it already attracted curious glances from a number of early New Guinea pioneers in linguistics like the Reverend Baldwin, although they left nothing but notes (see e.g. Capell n.d.; see also Capell 1969). The difficulties in reaching Rossel, 250 reef-strewn nautical miles off the mainland, have kept generations of the curious from its shores. This is not the first grammar of Yélî Dnye – that honour belongs to Jim Hen- derson’s (1995) Phonology and Grammar of Yele, Papua New Guinea, a work of a hundred pages packed with information.1 It is based on thirty years of experience that Jim and Anne Henderson have had translating the Bible into Yélî Dnye and promoting literacy in the language. It has proved a solid foundation on which to build, and I have been able to take over lock, stock and barrel the two most essen- tial parts of that analysis – the phoneme inventory (with minor modifications) and the analysis of the verb complex. These are the two most complex parts of the language, and without that work, this one would not have been possible on any 1 The first published work on Yélî Dnye is MacGregor (1890), followed by the anonymous report in the Annual Report on British New Guinea, 1893–4, pp. 116–12. Ray (1895) provides some com- parative vocabularies, with further notes by Armstrong in Annual Report, Papua, 1921–22, and in Ray (1938). Besides the works by the Hendersons and the present author (see references), the only other known material of value is a typescript by A. Capell, with notes by the Rev. B. Baldwin, in the SIL archives in Ukurumpa. Open Access. © 2022 Stephen C. Levinson, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733853-202 VIII   Preface reasonable timescale, if at all. This grammar absorbs most of the information in the earlier one, while being more explicit about many details and adding much richer information on sentence structure. I have tried to keep the terminology the same or similar to make it easy to compare the two works. I have benefited in other ways too from the Hendersons’ work. First, Jim shared with me his accumulation of handwritten verbal paradigms, which gave me a framework for later elicitation and saved years of fumbling in the dark. Sec- ondly, I took over the first edition of the dictionary the Hendersons published, which allowed me to rapidly set up a glossing system for texts – since then I was able to contribute many hundreds of words to their second edition (Henderson & Henderson 1999), partly I hope repaying the debt. Thirdly, I inherited some skilled collaborators, whom the Hendersons had trained to write and think about the language. Most important of these was Isidore Yidika, who served me, and this project, with extraordinary loyalty for more than 20 years, dropping all his other obligations at short notice to work with me whenever I was on Rossel. He was a man with only a few years’ formal education who had that extraordinary and rare ability to examine a language inside his own head. He died before this grammar was quite complete, and it is dedicated to him. His son Ghaalyu helped in the final stages of its completion. This work, which has been two decades in the making, would not have hap- pened without the initial support and help of the Catholic Church and its MSC Missionaries (as I was privileged to be able to tell His Holiness the late John Paul in 1998). Bishop Desmond Moore arranged my first and many subsequent trips to Rossel. The late Brother Colin Milne was the essential facilitator in Alotau, arrang- ing boats to my remote destination. Father Ensing based halfway at Nimowa helped me on my way many times, and we spent Cyclone Justin together in 1997, when the mission at Nimowa was almost totally destroyed and the mission on Rossel severely damaged, so that I spent a field season as an aid worker. The late Father Kevin English was my first host on Rossel, a man whose dedication to the people of Rossel is still legendary, and whose prowess on the steep and narrow paths of Rossel in his 80s I could not rival in my 40s. Following him, Father Michael Sims (the last Australian resident) likewise put all the resources of his mission at Jinjo at my service – without his radio, boats and generator, supplies and such, the logistics of work on Rossel would have been much more difficult for my first few fieldtrips. The dedication of the Catholic Mission to the peoples of the outer islands of the province was inspirational. In the last decade its material arm has been severely retrenched, with the loss of much infrastruc- ture and regular shipping, but it continues to run the primary school and clinic in difficult circumstances. Preface   IX In all the later years, I lived in the village of Wâpuchêdê, in the hamlet of Isidore Yidika Wombodo tp:oo, my principal consultant. He and his brothers pro- vided land, built bush-material houses for myself and my wife Penelope Brown, maintained them, guarded our stockpile of solar panels and the like, and in general made work on Rossel possible. I owe a huge debt to his extended family for their generosity and their thoughtful hospitality. Working on Rossel Island has been for me a wonderful experience – I mention this in the hope of inspiring other fieldworkers to work in the Papuan world, where a large proportion of the world’s remaining language diversity now resides. As an undergraduate, I vividly recollect hearing Meyer Fortes, the great British anthropologist, telling of his wonder at first moving amongst the Tallensi: “Here was the Old Testament come alive”. And so I felt on Rossel, in a fully functional ‘tribal’ society miraculously preserved into the 21st century, where kinship and clanship are the backbone of the social system, where people routinely reckon ten generations back in genealogy, where there is little effective government pres- ence, where subsistence methods are unchanged for millennia, and the things of the West have little importance. And what a rich world it is, in every way. A vast wealth of traditional knowledge, from fishing techniques to medicinal plants, from a huge mythology to a complex bilineal kinship system, from the intricacies of the shell money system to the complex beliefs behind the myriad sacred places on the island. And then there is the language, woven into all of this, constitutive of it in part, and flowing like a lifeblood into all these intricate social institutions. Here is a society of orators, with a rich ethnomusicology, native poetry, taboo vocabularies, divination sessions and enough complexity to fill the lives of many ethnographers of speaking. No one with a background in anthropology or linguis- tics could step on this enchanted island and not be in thrall for life. I should say something about the aims of this grammar. In some ways it is a byproduct of work on particular aspects of the language motivated by cross-lin- guistic comparison in my research group at the Max Planck Institute for Psy- cholinguistics. Many of the finer analytical points made below would not have emerged without the use of detailed elicitation techniques developed for the study of semantic typology, and I owe a big debt to all my colleagues, past and present, who helped develop those techniques. For a number of good reasons this is not, or not only, a text-based grammar. It is informed by a very large corpus of spoken Yélî Dnye, including records of every language genre (from conversa- tion to poetry to song to village courts to sorcery inquisitions) I have been able to record, but it is a language with both huge and systematic paradigms and nooks of horrible irregularity. A text-based approach would give one only fragments of this, and not allow one to get an overall picture of the maximal structure of the language – many aspects of that structure are arcane, or vanishingly rare in