The School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London

Overview

Study

Thesis title:

Which way is up? Motion verbs and paths of motion in Kubokota, an Austronesian language of the Solomon Islands

Year of Study:

Third year

Internal Supervisors

• Peter Austin

In my thesis I am investigating motion verbs and motion events in Kubokota. Kubokota has a complex system of motion verbs which lexicalise aspects of a motion event such as path, manner, ground, source and goal within the verb, or within a serial verb construction, in ways that are radically different from English. Motion verbs also exhibit interesting behaviour with regard to modality and event realisation. As in many Austronesian languages, the use of motion verbs is also closely tied to physical geography. The title ‘Which way is up?’ refers to the fact that from a given point on Ranongga Island, any of three directions may be described as ‘up’, depending on whether the speaker is operating on the domestic scale (where ‘up’ is inland), the navigational scale (where ‘up’ is southeast) or the coastal scale (where ‘up’ is from the beach onto the sea).

PhD Publications

Budd, Peter and Mary Raymond. 2007. Community-oriented outcomes of language documentation in Melanesia. In Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond and David Nathan (eds.), Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory, 51-57. London: SOAS.

Raymond, Mary. 2006a. Literacy work in Papua New Guinea: the accidental and the planned. In Peter K. Austin (ed.) Language Documentation and Description, Vol 4, 174-194. London: HRELP.

Raymond, Mary. 2006b. Stress and syllabification in Arop-Lokep: an Optimality-Theoretic account. SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol 14: 109-129. http://www.soas.ac.uk/academics/departments/linguistics/research/workingpapers/volume-14/37820.pdf

Raymond, Mary and Steve Parker. 2005. Initial and medial geminate trills in Arop-Lokep. Journal of the International Phonetics Association, 35(1): 99-111. 

Raymond, Mary and Jeffrey D’Jernes. 2005. Arop-Lokep Phonology Essentials. In Steve Parker (ed.), Phonological descriptions of PNG languages. Data Papers on Papua New Guinea Languages, 47, 109-190. Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea: Summer Institute of Linguistics. http://www.sil.org/pacific/png/abstract.asp?id=48163

PhD Conferences

 

PhD Affiliations