Māori
is a Polynesian language spoken in New Zealand. (It's possible
your browser is not showing the second letter of this word correctly if
unicode isn't enabled: it's "Maori" with a macron over the "a").
I grew up in NZ; my
first language is NZ English, not Māori
(I'm a
Pākeha - a native NZer with
European ancestors). However, Māori
culture has a continuing pervasive influence on NZ society.
I really became interested in Māori when I
took a course on Polynesian diachronic linguistics taught by
Ross Clark at the University of Auckland. It was eye-opening
to discover the similarities of many Polynesian languages to Māori
- somehow my childhood education had given me the impression it was
remarkably different from every other language. I immediately went
out and recorded a native speaker in Auckland's Department of Māori
studies. Since then I've taken the opportunity to record as much
speech as I can, with a particular focus on intonation and prosodic
phrasing.
I don't intend to write
a phonology or grammar of Māori. Instead
I've used my research on Māori to inform my
theoretical work. For example, it played a central role in
Maximal words and the Māori passive
(2003/2004), which argued that languages can place maximum length
restrictions on words. This idea was developed significantly by
Kate Gürtler in her 2007 dissertation.
I've also written about
Māori word stress, syllable structure,
intonation, reduplication, morphological haplology, and prosodic
phrasing in the articles listed below. Again, these discussions
are embedded in discussion of broader theoretical issues. I have a lot
of tapes as yet untranscribed and unanalyzed. My hope is to deal
with them as soon as time permits, which may be some time in 2009, I
hope.
A methodological note: Māori
gave me a deep appreciation for spending a lot of time working on one
language. Many people had worked on the Māori
passive, but it was only after working on its syllable
structure, morphology, and Prosodic Word form that I had the necessary
understanding to make sense of the complex passive and gerund allomorphies. Working on Māori
also made me aware of the different aims that dictionary- and
grammar-writers have from a theoretician; for example, Herbert Williams
like to revel in the exceptions to the otherwise robust generalizations
about the passive's and gerund's allomorphs, so much so that many people
have thought that the exceptions were the generalizations.
References
de Lacy, Paul (in press for January 2008). Phonological evidence. In
Steve Parker (ed.). Phonological argumentation: Essays on evidence and
motivation. Equinox Publications, ch.2.
[abstract] [chapter] [handout]
• Has a short discussion of Māori loanword phonology.
de Lacy, Paul (2004). Maximal Words and the Māori passive. In John
McCarthy (ed.) Optimality Theory in phonology: A reader. Blackwell, pp.
495-512. [chapter]
de Lacy, Paul (2003). Maximal words and the Māori passive. In Andrea
Rakowski and Norvin Richards (ed.) Proceedings of AFLA VIII: The eighth
meeting of the Austronesian formal linguistics association. MIT Working
Papers in Linguistics 44. Cambridge, MA: MIT Linguistics Dept, pp.20-39.
[abstract]
[article] [handout] [talk]
• These two articles are about the famous Māori passive allomorphy, and
the gerund. They discuss Māori syllable structure, foot structure,
and PrWd structure
de Lacy, Paul (2003). Constraint universality and prosodic phrasing in
Māori. In Angela Carpenter, Andries Coetzee, and Paul de Lacy (eds.)
Papers in Optimality Theory II. UMOP 26. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications,
pp.59-79. ROA 561.
[abstract] [chapter]
• Discusses prosodic phrasing and declarative and focus intonation in
Māori.
de Lacy, Paul (2001). Predicate nominals in Māori, Minimalist Syntax
Archive #179.
[article]
• The only pure syntax paper you'll find on this website. About
predicate nominals like "John is a teacher" and equatives "John is the
man" in Māori. It argues that NP/DP predicates end up in the same
place as D-linked wh-words, lending support to Sproat's original
analysis of VSO order as involving predicate movement to an A' position.
de Lacy, Paul (1999). Circumscriptive morphemes. In Catherine Kitto and
Carolyn Smallwood (eds.) Proceedings of AFLA (Austronesian Formal
Linguistics Association) VI. Toronto: Toronto Working Papers in
Linguistics, pp.107-120. [Also
ROA 339;
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~twpl/volume16.htm].
[abstract] [chapter] [poster]
• Looks at a morphological phenomenon in Māori which involves the
lengthening of an initial vowel in trisyllabic words. I analysize
it as a type of morphological haplology: where a phonologically
contentless morpheme coincides with part of the word and forces a
prosodic boundary in it.
de Lacy, Paul (1998). A cooccurence restriction in Maori. Te Reo
(Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand) 40: 10-44.
[article]
• Looks at cooccurrence restrictions on labials in Māori. Contains
some now outdated notions of feature underspecification.
de Lacy, Paul (1996). Circumscription revisited: an analysis of Maori
reduplication, Rutgers Optimality Archive #133.
[abstract] [article]
• Analyzes the seven different reduplication patterns of Māori.
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