Volume 67, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Non-Spatial Setting in Finisterre-Huon Papuan Languages

The verbal categories of Finisterre-Huon Papuan languages Awara, Ma Manda, Nek, and Nungon are typologically remarkable in several ways. Their tense systems have multiple subdivisions within past and future tenses. Tense is fused with number, but the number system varies depending on tense, with the most number values distinguished in the future tenses. Immediate and delayed imperatives are distinguished, with the immediate imperative implying brusqueness and the delayed imperative implying politeness. Aspect is generally encoded analytically, with auxiliary verb constructions, although some languages mark habitual aspect through a verbal suffix. Surprisingly, medial verbs may mark more aspectual distinctions than final verbs. Finally, although grammatical evidentiality is not widely known to exist in Papuan languages of northeastern New Guinea, non-firsthand evidentiality is found to be entwined with verbal aspect marking in both Awara and Nungon. The four Finisterre-Huon (FH) Papuan languages represented in this volume – Awara, Ma Manda, Nek, and Nungon – bring to light many of the unique typological characteristics of this group of under-described languages. The papers presented here offer a sense of the commonalities and differences found in the verbal inflectional systems of FH languages. This introduction provides general background on FH languages, and summarizes some of the points of convergence and divergence among the languages discussed in this volume.

This article describes how the Nek language of Papua New Guinea expresses non-spatial setting and mood in its verb system. Nek has verbal suffixes for the five tenses; five aspects are formed by auxiliary verbs and three by suffixes. Indicative and imperative/hortatory are the only moods; modality is mainly expressed by modal adverbs. Verbal subclasses are discussed briefly, and so is the status distinction between realis and irrealis, in order to facilitate understanding of the entire Nek verbal system.

This article describes the “non-spatial setting” (Dixon 2010: 152–155) of Ma Manda, a Finisterre-Huon language of Papua New Guinea – especially the categories of tense, aspect, reality status, and modality. Particularly noteworthy is the multiplicity of morpho-phonological verb classes which interact in unique ways with verbal inflections, the productive use of multi-verb constructions to encode aspectual and modal distinctions, and the diverse functions of the irrealis inflection. Discussion is paired with numerous paradigms and examples in order to be maximally beneficial to linguistic typology, as well as to foster detailed comparison among Finisterre-Huon languages.

This article describes the ways tense, aspect, mood, and modality are marked in the Finisterre-Huon Papuan language Awara. Awara uses verbal suffixes for all of these, as well as employing multi-verb constructions for four aspectual distinctions. Two past tenses, the present tense, and one future tense are marked. Distinguishing between the present tense suffix and the homophonous imperfective aspect suffix is a thorny issue in Awara morphology. The suffixes marking mood and modality belong to two classes of irrealis suffixes, which are similar in form to irrealis suffixes of other Finisterre-Huon languages. Awara is noteworthy for a grammatical distinction between static and dynamic verb classes, realized in different forms of imperfective aspectual suffixes.

The Finisterre-Huon Papuan language Nungon, like related languages, shows fusion of tense marking with number marking. Nungon is remarkable among Finisterre-Huon languages for an aspectual distinction conflated with evidentiality, and for the development of a formally marked realis Remote Future tense inflection with a formally unmarked irrealis counterpart. This paper presents the entire Nungon verbal inflectional system, including tense, aspect, status, subject and object indexing, referent tracking, and evidentiality.