One thing people often talk about is what they and others say. When they talk about speech, they often conceptualise it as an act: ‘she promised me’ or ‘he accused me’ or ‘I reprimanded him’ or ‘he lied to me’ or ‘they congratulated you’ or ‘I persuaded her to …’. The list of possible ‘speech acts’ is long, and has generated a substantial literature. Much of this of a philosophical bent extending the work of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1976, 1998). Some of it more inclined toward linguistics in that it deals with the pragmatics of speech—how we interpret and respond to what someone says (e.g., Leech 1983, ch.8; Shuy 2015), or with the structure of conversations (e.g., Sinclair & Coulthard 1975; Tsui 1994; O’Grady 2010).
Here, however, we set these matters aside and focus on speech act verbs, the verbs that speakers use to refer to the kinds of act exemplified above. Alongside these, languages have speech manner verbs like shout, stammer, and whisper, about which the literature has much less to say as they are relatively uncontroversial. Both speech act verbs and speech manner verbs are reconstructed below.
A number of studies have examined the meanings of speech act verbs. Verschueren (1980) and Wierzbicka (1985a, 1985b, 2003) argue that we must not assume that each language encodes the same set of speech acts in its speech act verbs. Vershueren’s (1980:4) claim is that only the speech acts which are relevant within the given culture will be lexicalised (that is, have words or expressions that denote them) and thus the analysis of speech acts and their classification should be done through detailed analysis of different languages’ speech act verbs (Vershueren 1980:34). Wierzbicka (1987, 2003) presents similar argumentation, stating that
every language imposes a certain categorization on the universe of speech acts, by offering labels such as exclaim, promise, complain, reproach, and so on. These labels are language-specific. This means the categorization offered by one language is different from that offered by another (Wierzbicka 1987:10).
She argues that these categorisations are ‘crucially important to the way we perceive the world we live in— the world of human relationships and human interaction.’ (1987:3). Further, “the primary act of speech act verbs consists in interpreting people’s speech acts, not in performing speech acts,” (1987:16) and thus
The set of English speech act verbs reflects a certain interpretation of the world of human action and interaction’…’but the categories for which English does provide names are evidently seen by the speakers of English as particularly important. They shape their perception of human attitudes and human relations (Wierzbicka 1987:10).
Thus the only way to understand this categorisation in a given language and through it its speakers’ interpretations of human actions and interactions, is to first analyse the structure of its speech act verbs (Wierzbicka 1987:9).
Ideally, then, this chapter would pursue two questions: (i) What types of meaning are lexicalised in Oceanic languages and appear to have been lexicalised in Proto Oceanic; and (ii) what is the grammatical behaviour of these lexemes, both in the modern languages and in Proto Oceanic? However, the available data limit what can be done. Dictionary definitions of speech act verbs are often only one or two words, and we are left guessing how a term is/was used in practice. As a result there are more question marks against reconstructed glosses in this chapter than elsewhere in these volumes. Sometimes examples tell us about a term’s grammatical behaviour, but we find that cognates differ in behaviour, so that (ii) has proven largely unachievable, other than that the subject is usually the speaker.2
Although absence of exact equivalence between speech act verbs in different languages is the norm, Leech (1983:205–226) sorts speech act verbs into five broad categories based on their sense and on the grammatical constructions in which they occur. We re-label four of them in order to avoid some of the jargon that has grown up around speech acts and speech act verbs.3 English constructions and examples follow.4 We take a following clause or to + verb phrase to be the verb’s complement, while objectA refers to an addressee. The morpheme introducing a complement is called a complementiser. In this terminology, then, that, if/ whether and to are complementisers.
Influence constructions resemble commitment constructions, except for the addition of an addressee object (the person the speaker seeks to influence) in influence constructions.
Semantic definitions of the four classes in (1) are inevitably wide. Report verbs refer to speech acts by which speakers convey the information in the complement to their addressee(s) (§12.3.1). A question verb refers to a speech act that seeks from some other person a verbal response to the complement (§12.3.3). An influence verb refers to a speech act that seeks to have the addressee(s) perform an act described in the complement (§12.3.4). A commitment verb refers to a speech act whereby the speaker(s) undertakes to perform (or in the case of refuse, not to perform) an act described in the complement. No commitment verbs are reconstructed below, a lacuna that is discussed in §12.3.5.
Leech’s expressives, e.g. greet (s.o.), thank (s.o. for s.t.), excuse (s.o. from s.t.), accuse (s.o. of s.t.), praise (s.o. for s.t.), congratulate (s.o. on s.t.), apologise (to s.o. for s.t.) differ from report verbs in that they usually occur without a complement clause because the speech act’s semantic content is expressed by the speech act verb itself (Leech 1983:217–218). Expressives are particularly specific to their speakers’ culture in the sense discussed by Verschueren and Wierzbicka, but we do find a few cognate sets that permit the reconstruction of earlier expressive speech act verbs (§12.4).
In both English and many Oceanic languages the same verb may occur in different constructions with different meanings. Tell, for example, is both a report and an influence verb. The distinction is made by the complement construction: report I told him that I was going home vs influence I told them that they should go home or I told them to go home. Ask is both a question and an influence verb: We asked if the school would be closed vs We asked the children to go home. Thus it is the verb and the construction together that convey whether the speech act being talked about is conceived as reporting, questioning, influencing or committing.6
In light of the above, data for this chapter were assembled in two ways. First, as usual, we searched all the available lexical sources for speech act and speech manner verbs. We also searched grammatical descriptions for examples of speech act verb usage in the context of the constructions with which they occur. Examples from sixty or so Oceanic languages were collected, but these are sometimes incomplete. Often we do not find construction data for commitment verbs. This is apparently a result of the distribution of the four classes in the data. Where ‘>’ means ‘is more frequent than’, we find report > influence > question > commitment.
The framework above seems messy: a few English speech act verbs belong to two or more of the four classes, and some English constructions occur in more than one class. The apparent mess reflects the interaction of numerous factors which we gloss over here. What is interesting is that each Oceanic language for which there are adequate data on the co-occurrence of constructions with speech act verbs displays a similar set of overlaps. Just as the complementiser that occurs with English report, influence and commitment verbs, in Sursurunga (MM, St George, south New Ireland) the complementiser ŋo occurs with all four classes. And just as a conditional should or would occurs in the that-complement of an English influence or commitment verb, so the verb in the complement of a Sursurunga influence or commitment verb is in the irrealis mood, as in (5) and (6). We saw from (1c) and (1d) above that English influence and commitment constructions differ only in the addition of an addressee object to influence constructions, an addition that follows from their semantics. The same difference is reflected in (5) and (6) below.
In each of (2) to (6) the speech act verb is underlined and the complement clause is surrounded by square brackets. The complementiser is bolded.
| mutwən | dan | ə | Uiam | di | lu | parai | [ŋo | a | lu | arpukus] | |
| river.mouth | river | ART | U. | S:3P | HAB | say | C | S:3S | HAB | dangerous |
| kalilik | di | gatna | [ŋo | də-k | lu | kas | ioh | mə]… | |
| guys | S:3P | ask | C | S:3P.IRR-SEQ | HAB | dig,up | earth.oven | now |
| Mə | pəkənbuŋ | iau | gəlta | di | [ŋo | dənih | a | loŋoi | ə | kalik | er | ə-k | taŋ,…] | |
| CJ | then | S:1S | ask | O:3S | C | what | S:3S | do | spec | child | dem | S:3S-SEQ | cry |
| əi | tata | a | dos-i | iau | suri | [ŋo | ina | sari | lamas | munaŋ,.…] | |
| D:3S | dad | S:3S | command-TR | O:1S | PURP | C | S:1S.IRR | climb | coconut.tree | that.below |
| … | tan | kələmul | di | sorməŋət | mai | muswan | [ŋo | da | tur | talum | suri | loŋoi | ə | rumə-n | aratintin | kə-n | elementiri] | |
| … | PL | person | S:3P | assent | with | faithfulness | C | S:3P.IRR | stand | together | PURP | build | ART | house-P:3S | teaching | PCL-P:3S | elementary |
Another instance of similarity between English and Oceanic is that some speech act verbs occur in more than one category. English tell and Wayan Fijian veðe ‘tell’ both occur as both report (7) and influence (8) verbs
| a | nei | veðe-i | au | o | Taina | [me | gu | dau | vakateke-i | Adi] | |
| S:3S | HAB | tell-TR | O:1S | ART | T. | C | S:1S | HAB | spoil-TR | Adi |
| gu | sā | veðē | [me | vakarau | laka] | |
| S:1S | PERFECTIVE | tell.O:3S | C | prepare | go |
The same can be said of Mussau ue, Wuvulu -ware, Lou pa, Kele pe, Mangap -so, Bariai -keo, Yabem -sʊm, Minaveha -vone, Tawala -baha, ’Ala’ala -tani-, Bola taki-, Nakanai vei, Tabar oeŋ, Siar war-, Halia hate-, Teop sue, Papapana -vatani-, Zabana kahe-, Kokota ōe, Maringe ceke-, Gela bosa, Tolo koe, Longgu ili-, Arosi woi, Teanu -ko, Vurës ɣaɣnɛɣ, Mwotlap vap, Maskelynes -kel, Tamambo viti-, NE Ambae veve, Neverver -ver, Paamese vite, Lewo -pisa, Nêlêmwa xabʷe, Tinrin hĩḍɔ, Kosraean fæk, Marshallese ciṛoŋ, Mokilese pʷēŋ, Boumaa Fijian tuʔu-, Tongan tala, Tuvalu fai. The fact that the same word can be used with both report and influence constructions in so many Oceanic languages points to the likelihood that POc also had verbs similar in sense to English tell, meaning roughly ‘communicate (s.t. to s.o.)’. Two such verbs are tentatively reconstructed in §12.3.2. But the fact that the just listed verbs form a number of cognate sets (or belong to no known set) is a warning that speech act verbs are quite labile in Oceanic languages.
Of all these verbs, just two also occur as question verbs: Tawala baha and Boumaa Fijian tuʔu, probably because they are general verbs of saying.
Although English ask occurs as both a question and an influence verb, the only clear Oceanic instances of this semantic range in our data are Micronesian: Kosraean siyʌk, Marshallese kaccitʌk. This is not really surprising, as English ask is unusual in this regard. Many languages, it seems, use different speech act verbs in contexts that approximately correspond to English ask, e.g. German fragen (question) vs bitten (influence), Spanish preguntar vs rogar, Russian sprosit’ vs poprosit’, Hungarian kérdezni vs kérni (Verschueren 1980:27), Japanese tazuneru vs tamomu, Mandarin wèn vs yào.7 Note, however, that there is a derivational relationship between the two verbs in Russian and in Hungarian.
One difference between English and many Oceanic languages resides in the fact that English question, influence and commitment verbs have an alternative construction, to + verb phrase. This is an instance of “desententialisation” (Lehmann 1988), the tendency across languages for non-report verbs to occur with reduced complements that are no longer sentence-like. Like Sursurunga in (2)–(6), most Oceanic languages appear to lack reduced complements. Of the sixty or so Oceanic languages examined, only four have them. One is Teop (MM, Northwest Solomonic, north Bougainville), where influence verbs occur with two constructions. In (9) the complement clause is marked with the imperative preverbal clitic =re, and is a full clause. Alone, but with a second-person plural pronoun, its clause would be an imperative: ‘You go to the garden!’.
| na | tariko | ma=e | Saritavi | [enam=re | nao | mohina]. | |
| R | ask | DIR=ART | S. | D:1EP=IMPERATIVE | go | garden |
In (10) the complement is reduced: the complementiser is purposive tea and the subject is deleted as it is identical with the addressee (mōn ‘female’) of the influence verb sue ‘tell’.
| e | iā | na | sue | ki | bona | mōn | [tea | mamata | bono | matavu] | |
| ART | mother | R | tell | PREP | ACC | female | C | open | ACC | door |
Other languages in which we have found reduced complements are Wayan Fijian (see example 8), Kosrean (Lee 1975:307) and Mokilese (Harrison 1976:293–294).8
English and Oceanic complement clauses differ in another respect. It is well known that the complements of English speech verbs (‘indirect speech’) are potentially affected by two phenomena relative to the clauses they are allegedly quoting. Thus a direct quotation like ‘I don’t want to be here,’ John said becomes John said [he didn’t want to be there]. The first phenomenon is deictic shift. As the speaker of the latter sentence is not John and is not at the place where John had spoken, the I of direct quotation becomes he and here becomes there. The second phenomenon is tense shift. As the speech act verb said of the latter sentence is in the past tense, the present tense verb don’t want of direct quotation shifts tense to past didn’t want. Oceanic languages employ deictic shift, but to our knowledge none shift tense. This appears to be a common pattern around the world.
It should be noted here that in Oceanic narrative texts direct quotation is much more common than indirect speech.
Thus far, we have assumed that speech acts are referred to by dedicated verbs, and indeed sometimes they are, as shown by the reconstructions in the following sections. But languages differ in this regard. For example, Mangap (NNG) has numerous apparent compounds that refer to speech acts. These consist of a verb plus an element that may be an adverb, a noun or another verb. The dictionary usually treats an adverb or noun as a separate word but joins a second verb to the first as a single word.9 Some of these compounds are semantically quite transparent, especially those with adverbs, e.g. -so katkat ‘speak frankly’, where -so means ‘say, speak’ and katkat means ‘openly, directly’. Others are fairly opaque, like -so-pe ‘advise (s.o.), instruct (s.o.)’, where -pe is ‘be firm, be settled’. Further compounds with -so are shown in (11).
| Compound | gloss | second element | with gloss |
|---|---|---|---|
| -so katkat | ‘speak frankly’ | katkat | ‘openly, directly’ |
| -so sorok | ‘speak baselessly’ | sorok | ‘insignificant, ordinary’ |
| -so-kāla | ‘cut s.o.’s talk short’ | -kāla | ‘go on top of’ |
| -so-pe | ‘advise (s.o.), instruct (s.o.)’ | -pe | ‘be firm, be settled’ |
| -so-kere | ‘talk s.o. into doing s.t. wrong’ | -kere | ‘lead, take the lead’ |
| -so-yāra | ‘speak publicly, proclaim’ | -yāra | ‘shine, give off light’ |
The compounds above are report or influence expressions. Compounds formed with wi- ‘ask’ are question expressions, as seen in (12). Alone, -wi A pa B (pa is a multipurpose preposition) means either ‘ask A about B’ or ‘ask A for B’.
| Compound | gloss | second element | with gloss |
|---|---|---|---|
| -wi kankāna | ‘ask stupid questions, ask a rhetorical question’ | kankāna | ‘stupid’ |
| -wi kinkin | ‘interrogate, persist in asking’ | kinkin | ‘persistently’ |
| -wi tapāra | ‘ask repeatedly’ | -tapāra | ‘repeatedly’ |
| -wi-sese | ‘interrogate, ask repeatedly’ | -sese | ‘sew up, mend’ |
| -wi-nanāna | ‘investigate, ask many people’ | -nanāna | ‘chase’ |
| -wi-pe | ‘ask in order to hear well’ | -pe | ‘be firm, be settled’ |
A number of other speech act compounds are listed in (13). The first verb is one of -suŋ, -kuru and -ŋgal. Alone -suŋ A pa B means ‘ask A for B’. The other two verbs are not speech act verbs when used alone: -kuru means ‘thread (s.t.) through a hole, put into a container’, and -ŋgal ‘throw’ or ‘pierce’.
| Compound | gloss | second element | with gloss |
|---|---|---|---|
| -suŋ sosor | ‘wish evil, threaten, curse’ | sosor | ‘wrongdoing’ |
| -kuru kopo- | ‘stir up, incite, provoke (s.o.)’ | kopo- | ‘stomach’ |
| -kuru lele- | ‘stir up, incite, provoke (s.o.)’ | lele- | ‘inside’ |
| -kuru sua pa A | ‘accuse A falsely’ | sua | ‘talk (N)’ |
| -ŋgal sua pa A | ‘accuse A (often falsely)’ (= ‘throw talk at’) | sua | ‘talk (N)’ |
| -ŋgal lele- | ‘speak publicly, proclaim’ (= ‘pierce the inside’) | lele- | ‘inside (N)’ |
| -ŋgal talŋa- | ‘tell a secret, tip off’ (= ‘pierce the ears’) | talŋa- | ‘ear’ |
| -ŋgal-rāma | ‘teach (s.o.), instruct (s.o.)’ | rāma | ‘be together’ |
| -ŋgal-sek pa A | ‘forbid someone from doing s.t.’ | -sek | ?? |
Among the expressions in (13) is (in two versions), -kuru/-ŋgal sua pa A ‘accuse A falsely’. It includes the noun sua ‘talk’. Mangap has many speech act expressions that include sua, and a sample is listed in (14).
| Compound | gloss | semi-literal gloss |
|---|---|---|
| -ur sua pa A | ‘order A, command A’ | ‘put talk to A’ |
| -piri sua pa A | ‘curse A, speak badly to A’ | ‘toss (bad) talk at A’ |
| -gībi sua pa A | ‘curse A, speak badly to A’ | ‘throw talk at A’ |
| -suk sua pa A | ‘accuse A’ | ?? |
| -tōro sua | ‘speak figuratively’ | ‘turn talk’ |
| -kam sua pa A | ‘rebuke A, exhort A’ | ‘do talk to/about A’ |
| -kam sua bōzo pa A | ‘complain about A’ | ‘do a lot of talk about A’ |
| -mbuk sua pa A pa B | ‘promise A concerning B’ | ‘tie talk to A concerning B’ |
| -la sua lelē-ne | ‘have an in-depth discussion’ | ‘go (to) the talk’s inside’ |
| -so le-A sua | ‘have a chat with A’ | ‘say A’s talk’ |
The last entry above perhaps needs explanation. The noun sua ‘talk’ is indirectly possessed, that is, the possessor suffix is attached not to the possessed noun sua but to the possessive classifier le- to give le-n sua ‘their talk’ in (15).10
| zin | mōri | ti-zzo | le-n | sua | |
| PL | girl | S:3P-REDUP.say | PCL-P:3P | talk |
Finally, (13) includes four body-part expressions, -kuru kopo- ‘stir up, incite, provoke (s.o.)’, -kuru lele- ‘stir up, incite, provoke (s.o.)’, -ŋgal lele- ‘speak publicly, proclaim’, ŋgal talŋa- ‘tell a secret, tip off’, which include the body-part terms kopo- ‘stomach’, lele- ‘inside’ and talŋa- ‘ear’. Body-part terms play a large role in denoting emotions in Oceanic languages (vol.5, ch.9), and—not unexpectedly—Mangap kʷo- ‘mouth’ figures in a number of speech act expressions. Some of these appear in (16).
| Compound | gloss | semi-literal gloss |
|---|---|---|
| kʷo- iŋgal | ‘warn, remind’ | ‘mouth pierces’ |
| -yo kʷo- pa | ‘complain about (s.o)’ | ‘collect mouth concerning’ |
| kʷo- i-belek pa | ‘mock, ridicule (s.o)’ | ‘mouth despises’ |
| kʷo- i-kanan | ‘nag, be after’ | ‘mouth is biting/eating’ |
| kʷo- i-pun | ‘attack verbally, tear into, rip into’ | ‘mouth hits’ |
| kʷo- i-pusuk | ‘urge, push someone to do s.t.’ | ‘mouth pushes’ |
| kʷo- i-sala OR i-se | ‘raise one’s voice’ | ‘mouth ascends’ |
| kʷo- i-su | ‘talk calmly’ | ‘mouth descends’ |
| kʷo- i-sala ŋwa- | ‘order one’s superiors around’ | ‘mouth ascends on top of’ |
| kʷo- i-sala ute- | ‘talk disrespectfully to people older than oneself’ | ‘mouth goes over the head’ |
| kʷo- sanāna | ‘cry out, yell, scream, shriek’ | ‘mouth is bad’ |
The grammar of these expressions is straightforward. The noun kʷo- ‘mouth’ essentially stands in for the speaker, so that in (17) kʷo-ŋ [mouth-P:1S] ‘my mouth’ stands in for ‘I’. As the subject of the clause is ‘my mouth’, the verb takes a third person singular subject coreferencing prefix i-.
| kʷo-ŋ | i-belek | pa | mōri | tana | …. | |
| mouth-P:1S | S:3S-mock | PREP | girl | DEM | … |
The distribution across Oceanic languages of compounds like those in Mangap is impossible to ascertain, as typically neither dictionaries nor grammars pay much attention to them. However, Lewo (NCV) makes plentiful use of speech act compounds that resemble those in (11) and (12). These are described by Early (1993), and (18) gives a selection of his examples.11
| Compound | gloss | semi-literal gloss |
|---|---|---|
| visa-ari | ‘promise’ | say-duration |
| visa-kare | ‘criticise’ | say-spoil |
| visa-lupʷari | ‘forbid’ | say-prohibit |
| visa-wali | ‘announce’ | say-away |
| visa-mumu | ‘grumble’ | say-crush |
| visa-lawe | ‘say without thinking’ | say-thoughtless |
| visa-lua | ‘command’ | say-separate |
| visa-ro | ‘interrupt’ | say-divide |
| visa-yu | ‘discuss’ | say-extend |
| viun-kare | ‘ask impolitely, be nosey’ | ask-spoil |
Motu (PT) gʷau ‘say, speak’ behaves like Lewo visa ‘say’, as a glance at Lister-Turner & Clark’s (1954) dictionary shows. Wayan Fijian tata ‘say, speak’ behaves similarly, as shown by the examples from Pawley & Sayaba’s (2022) dictionary listed in (19).
| Compound | gloss | second element | with gloss |
|---|---|---|---|
| tata beði- | ‘speak belittlingly of s.o.’ | beði | ‘fail to show respect for s.o.’ |
| tata ðakaðā | ‘swear or speak vulgarly’ | ðakaðā | ‘be bad, of poor quality’ |
| tata leke | ‘speak briefly’ | leke | ‘be short’ |
| tata moðe | ‘talk in one’s sleep’ | moðe | ‘sleep’ |
| tata musuki- | ‘interrupt s.o.’ | musu | ‘be cut crossways’ |
| tata gʷau | ‘boast, tbe a loud mouth’ | gʷau | ‘be too big, over-sized’ |
| tata matani- | ‘scold or criticise s.o. to their face’ | mata | ‘opening, interstices as in the mesh of a net’ |
| tata sese | ‘speak idly’ | sese | ‘without normal constraints’ |
| tata vaka-mōmō | ‘speak with dignity’ | mōmō | ‘chief’ (vaka- MANNER) |
| tata ðadruðadru | ‘stutter, stammer’ | ðadruðadru | ‘keep picking things out’ |
| tata āsagasaga | ‘speak in a trembling voice’ | āsagasaga | ‘be unsteady, shake’ |
However, one cannot assume that all Oceanic languages function like Mangap or Lewo. A search of the Wayan dictionary suggests that not many Wayan speech act verbs behave like this. Instead, there are many different lexical verbs, and the language also employs derivational affixes to produce verbs with senses that are sometimes not predictable from the root. Thus tata occurs in a basic transitive tata-ni- ‘speak to (s.o.)’, an applicative tata-takini- ‘talk about (s.t), complain or speak angrily about (s.t.)’, a reciprocal vī-tata-ni ‘converse, talk to one another’, and a frequentative tātata, ‘talk a lot, be talkative’. The verb kʷai ‘say (s.t.), mention (s.t.)’ (transitive: kʷaya) appears not to occur in compound expressions, but only in derived forms: the frequentatives kʷakʷai (transitive: kʷakʷaiti-) ‘gossip (about s.o.), talk critically or slanderously about s.o. in their absence’ and kʷaya-kʷaya ‘keep mentioning (s.t.), keep talking about (s.t.)’. The same is evidently true of rō (transitive: rōti-) ‘send a request to s.o. (asking for s.t.), give information to s.o.’ with its derived forms vaka-roti- ‘go and tell (s.o.)’ (vaka- causative) and vīrōroti ‘invite or summon people, bring in or gather people or animals’. Similar derivations occur with many other speech verbs.
Various obstructions stand in the way of speech act verb reconstruction. One is their lability, (§12.1.2). Another is that reconstructions are often difficult to gloss. This, too, is partly due to lability: the meaning of a POc speech verb’s reflexes can change considerably as one moves eastward. But, more importantly, it is because many sources gloss them too briefly, leaving us with no information as to which class(es) of speech act verb a verb belongs to or, if the verb is transitive, whether its object is the speaker’s addressee or an indirect speech complement or a piece of direct speech (§12.1.1). Reconstructing POc usage is thus fraught with uncertainties.
One development that occurs at various times and places in the development of Oceanic speech act verbs is the occasional grammaticalisation of one of these verbs as a complementiser.
The first stage in this development is represented by Paamese (NCV). In (20) the verb -vit ‘say’ functions as a report verb. In (21) it is the second verb of a serial verb construction that consists of the question verb -vīsi- ‘ask (s.o a question)’ and -vit ‘say’. Here -vit simply has the function of introducing the complement clause, but it is syntactically a verb, as it takes a subject prefix (‘they asked me … they said…’).
| a-vit | [eimas | kan | keilu] | |
| S:3P-say | sorcery | eat | D:3D |
| a-vīsi-nau | a-vit | [vakili | ona-k | mat] | |
| S:3P-ask-O:1S | S:3P-say | canoe | PCL-P:1S | die |
Nêlêmwa (NCal) represents the second step. In (22) the verb xabʷe ‘say’ functions as a report verb and is preceded by a subject pronoun.
| i | xabʷe | [io | kio | i | uya] | |
| S:3S | say | FUTURE | NEGATIVE | S:3S | arrive |
In (23), xabʷe follows the verb fāɣēn ‘ask’, but this is no longer a serial construction like (21), as xabʷe has lost its subject pronoun and become grammaticalised as a complementiser. Example (24) confirms this nicely, as it contains the verb i u xabʷe ‘he said’ and then the complementiser xabʷe that no longer has semantic function, only the syntactic function of introducing the complement.
| na | fāɣēn | [xabʷe | buca | da | hōli] | |
| S:1S | ask | C | noise | what | that |
| ix | u | xabʷe | ʃi | pʷayiliy | [xabʷe | io | ix | u | ã] | |
| S:3S | PERFECTIVE | say | PREP | P. | C | FUT | S:3S | PERFECTIVE | depart |
A third stage in this development occurs when a complementiser is phonologically reduced. Some of these appear in the cognate sets below.
Reflexes of the report, question, influence and commitment verbs reconstructed in §§12.3.1–12.3.5 are commonly found with an indirect speech complement, as described in §12.1, and one may infer that this was also true of the reconstructed verbs.
Some of the POc report verbs reconstructed below were very probably also used in senses that went beyond their speech act senses. Data supporting this inference are given in §12.6.
We infer from the glosses in the cognate sets below that POc *kʷa/*kʷai- and *pʷa/*pʷai-, both ‘say, tell’, were perhaps the most neutral POc report verbs. Their similarity in form is probably fortuitous, and we see no difference in reconstructable meaning. Reflexes of both are well distributed across Oceania, although there are areas where one or the other predominates: *kʷa/*kʷai in Guadalcanal (SES), in northern Vanuatu and in Fiji; *pʷa/*pʷai in Western Oceanic, in Malaita (SES), in central Vanuatu and in Polynesia. The two coexist in Micronesia.
Some of the reflexes of both verbs are complementisers, glossed simply with (C). We infer that complementisers of the form ka reflect intransitive *kʷa, while those of the form ke reflect transitive *kʷai-. A parallel observation applies to complementiser reflexes of *pʷa/*pʷai-, but with complications due to the reflexes of *pʷ-, which are discussed in connection with POc *pʷaca(q) below. Maskelynes ke, true to the description in §12.2, is an instance of a form that survives as both a verb and a complementiser, like Nêlêmwa xabʷe in (23) and (24). The same is true of NE Ambae -vo and Mafea -v.
Just a few reflexes of *kʷa, *kʷai- appear also to be influence verbs, either because their glosses show this (Arosi, Kosaean, Rotuman) or because we have influence examples (Vurës). Similarly there are influence examples of reflexes of *pʷa, *pʷai- (Tolai, Papapana, Mwotlap, Kosraean and Marshallese). These seem to be an extensions of the use of a ‘say’ verb in various languages rather than a feature reconstructable to POc.
POc *kʷa was inherited from a PMP form which Reid (2012) writes *kuwá, with final stress. It is easy to see that this might have been pronounced *kʷa.
| PAn | *kuaS | ‘say’ (Wolff 2010: 878) 12 | |
| PMP | *kuwá | ‘say’ (Reid 2012) | |
| POc | *kʷa, *kʷai- | ‘say, tell’ (Ross 2011: 29-30) | |
| Adm | Seimat | ka-k | ‘talk’ (reduplication?) |
| Adm | Seimat | ka | [C] |
| NNG | Gitua | ɣai | ‘say, tell’ |
| NNG | Mumeng | kəy-aŋ | [N] ‘speech, talk’ (-aŋ NOM) |
| PT | Gapapaiwa | kae | ‘tell a story, ask (a question), ask (for s.t.)’ |
| MM | Halia | ka | [C] |
| MM | Blablanga | o-ʔoe | ‘say’ |
| MM | Kokota | oe-ni | ‘say’ |
| SES | Gela | ko-koe | ‘converse’ (reduplication) |
| SES | Birao | koe- | ‘say’ |
| SES | Talise | koe- | ‘say’ |
| SES | Lengo | kɔe- | ‘say’ |
| TM | Äiwoo | kɒ- | ‘say, think, want to’ |
| NCV | Vurës | kʷa-kʷ | ‘talk, speak, say’ (reduplication) |
| NCV | Mwotlap | ka-ka | ‘tell story’ (reduplication) |
| NCV | Lonwolwol | ke | [C] |
| NCV | Rerep | ke | [C] |
| NCV | Maskelynes | -ke | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Maskelynes | ke | [C] |
| NCV | Port Sandwich | -ka, -kae | ‘say’ |
| SV | Anejom̃ | -ka | ‘say’ |
| PMic | *kai | ‘inform’ (Bender et al. 2003a) | |
| Mic | Kosraean | kai | ‘talk to; warn, advise; admonish, instruct, persuade’ |
| Mic | Chuukese | æ | ‘tell it, sing it’ |
| Mic | Carolinian | æ- | [N, VI] ‘say, speak’ |
| Mic | Woleaian | xāi-u | ‘tell, mention, say’ |
| Mic | Ulithian | kay-a | ‘say’ |
| PCP | *kʷai | ‘say, tell’ | |
| Fij | Rotuman | ʔe- | ‘say, tell, instruct, request’ |
| Fij | Wayan | kʷai- | ‘say s.t., mention s.t., talk about s.o.’ |
| Fij | Nadrau | kʷay-a | ‘say’ (Geraghty 1983: 45) |
| Fij | Bauan | kai | ‘say’ (mostly used in kai-naki ‘it is said’) |
| Pn | Tongan | ke | [C] |
| Pn | Tuvalu | kē | [C] |
| PNPn | *kai | ‘traditional story’ | |
| Pn | Tikopia | kai | ‘traditional tale’ (originally from Firth) |
| Pn | Nukuoro | kai | ‘legend, story’ |
| Pn | Kapingamarangi | kai | ‘recount, history of’ |
| Pn | Nukuria | kai | ‘legend, story’ |
| Pn | Māori | kai | ‘riddle, puzzle, toy’ |
| Pn | Tuamotuan | ka-kai | ‘story, tale, fable’ |
It is tempting to associate POc *pʷa/*pʷai- ‘say, tell’ with *[pʷa]pʷa(q) ‘inner mouth’ (vol.5:128), but it seems more probable that this is a chance resemblance. The earliest convincing ancestor of *pʷa/*pʷai- is reconstructable as PCEMP *bai ‘say’. Non-Oceanic evidence for the latter consists of PCMP *bei ‘say’ (ACD) and PSHNG *ba/*be.13
The forms listed under ‘cf. also’ are probably reduplications of reflexes of *pʷa and *pʷai-.
| PCEMP | *bai | ‘say’ | |
| POc | *pʷa, *pʷai- | ‘say, tell’ | |
| Adm | Mussau | ba | [C] |
| Adm | Wuvulu | pa | [C] |
| Adm | Lou | pa | ‘say’ |
| Adm | Baluan | pʷa | ‘say, express, think’ |
| Adm | Pak | pʷay | ‘say, tell’ |
| Adm | Titan | pʷa | ‘say’ |
| Adm | Kele | -pe | ‘say’ |
| Adm | Loniu | -pʷay | [VT] ‘say’ |
| NNG | Mangap | be | [C] |
| NNG | Kaulong | vo | ‘talk, say, speak; suppose, intend’ |
| NNG | Bebeli | pʷa | ‘say, express, think’ |
| NNG | Mato | ba | [C] |
| NNG | Gedaged | pai | ‘tell, say, speak to, declare, impart, announce, acquaint, proclaim’ |
| NNG | Manam | be | [C] |
| NNG | Yabem | -be | ‘think, mean, want’ |
| NNG | Yabem | (ge)be | [C] ‘it means’ |
| NNG | Labu | -pɛ | ‘say’ |
| NNG | Mumeng | vʸa | [N] ‘talk, language, speech, animal noise’ (vʸ- < POc *pʷ-) |
| PT | Misima | ba | ‘say’ |
| PT | Bunama | be | [C] |
| PT | Tawala | -pa | ‘say’ |
| PT | Tawala | pa | [C] |
| PT | Motu | -gʷa | [VI] ‘speak’ |
| MM | Nakanai | vei- | [VT] ‘say’ |
| MM | Tabar | va | [C] |
| MM | Tolai | ba | [C] |
| MM | Tolai | ve | ‘tell’ (Franklin et al. 1974) |
| MM | Papapana | wa | [VT] ‘say’ |
| MM | Banoni | va | ‘say’ |
| MM | Sisiqa | vö | ‘say’ |
| SES | Lau | bae | ‘speak, talk, say, tell’ (also in compounds) |
| SES | Lau | bae-a | [N] ‘speech, word’ |
| NCV | Ambae | -vo | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Mafea | -v | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Sa | vé | [C] |
| NCV | Tirax | -ve | ‘say, tell’ |
| NCV | Atchin | wa | [C] |
| NCV | Lewo | ve | [IRREALIS] ‘say’ |
| NCV | Lewo | pe | [REALIS] ‘say’ |
| NCal | Paicî | páa | ‘speak, discuss’ |
| PMic | *pʷā | [VT] ‘tell’ (Bender et al. 2003a) | |
| Mic | Kosraean | fæ-k | [VT] ‘say, tell, announce’ |
| Mic | Marshallese | pʷa | [VT] ‘tell’ |
| Mic | Marshallese | pʷe | (C, DEONTIC) |
| Mic | Mokilese | pʷa | [V; C] ‘say’ |
| Mic | Ponapean | pʷa | ‘say’ |
| Mic | Woleaian | fʷe | [C] |
| Mic | Ulithian | vʷo | [C] |
| Pn | Tongan | fai | ‘do, utter, tell’ |
| Pn | Tongan | pe | [C] |
| Pn | Samoan | fai | ‘do, say’ |
| Pn | Samoan | fai mai, fai atu | ‘say’ |
| Pn | Tuvalu | fai | ‘say’ |
| SES | Longgu | vava | ‘speak’ |
| PNCV | *vava | ‘speak, say’ | |
| NCV | Mota | vava | ‘speak, say’ |
| NCV | Lolovoli | veve | ‘tell (s.o. s.t.), tell (s.o. to do s.t.)’ |
| NCV | Raga | veve | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Tamambo | veve(nasa) | ‘whisper’(Jauncey 2011b: 397) |
| NCV | Apma | vep | ‘say, speak’ |
POc *pʷaca(q), *pʷaca(q)i- ‘speak, say’ appears to have been a straightforward report verb. The near-absence of ‘tell’ from the glosses of its reflexes suggests that it it was not used as an influence verb. Exceptions are the Tawala transitive form bahe- and Gela bosa-, which are recorded in both report and influence constructions.
Intransitive *pʷaca(q) may have been used in the sense of ‘speak’, i.e. to denote the act of speaking. The glosses of the Tawala, Gela, Longgu, Chuukese and Boumaa Fijian reflexes suggest that this POc form was also used as a noun meaning ‘word, speech, language’.
The reconstruction of the POc consonant *pʷ is discussed in vol.1:16, and it has since been investigated in some detail by Lynch (2002e). Its rarity of occurrence means that its reflexes have not been fully formulated. Lynch (2002e:337) finds that it is in any case unstable. The sequence *pʷa often becomes *po or *bo, or simply *pa, and it is a combination of these reflexes that points to POc *pʷa, as Lynch’s examples show. This is also true of the cognate set below.
Given the overall rarity of forms in POc *pʷa-, one wonders whether there is a historical connection between *pʷaca(q) below and *pʷa above, but if there is, it probably lies too far back in time to be elucidated.
| PAn | *bajaq | ‘tell, inform, ask, enquire, know, understand’ (ACD) | |
| POc | *pʷaca(q) | [V] ‘speak’; [N] ‘word, speech, language’ | |
| POc | *pʷaca(q)i- | ‘speak (s.t.), say (s.t.)’ | |
| Adm | Lou | poso-ek | ‘talk slowly’ |
| NNG | Bariai | -posa-posa | ‘speak’ |
| NNG | Kove | -posa | ‘speak’ |
| NNG | Sio | pai | ‘speak to someone; address’ (-i < POc *-s/C) |
| PT | Tawala | -baha | [VI] ‘speak, talk’; [N] ‘word’ |
| PT | Tawala | -bahe | [VT] ‘tell (s.o.)’ |
| MM | West Kara | ve-bos | ‘speak’ |
| MM | Teop | boha | [VT] ‘say (s.t.), speak, talk, converse’ |
| SES | Gela | bosa | [V; N] ‘say, speak, talk, tell, command; word, command)’ |
| SES | Lengo | bosa | ‘say’ |
| SES | Longgu | bosa | [N] ‘word, language’ |
| SES | Arosi | potaʔi | [VT] ‘beg, beseech; ask for s.t.’ |
| PNCV | *vʷasa | ‘speak, say’ | |
| NCV | Nokuku | ve-vas | ‘invite’ |
| NCV | Kiai | vosai | ‘advice, admonishment’ |
| NCV | Tamambo | vasa | ‘speak’ |
| NCV | Namakir | (manu)vas | ‘title of man who speaks on behalf of the chief’ |
| NCV | Nguna | vasa | ‘talk, speak, preach’ |
| Fij | Bauan | vosa | ‘speak, talk’ |
| Fij | Bauan | vosa-k- | ‘speak to’ |
| Fij | Boumā | vosa | [V; N] ‘speak, talk; language, word’ |
Cognate sets supporting the reconstructions below are far more limited than those above, and the data do not show whether these were complement-taking verbs.
The distribution of reflexes of *bʷala ‘say, speak’ is sufficient to support a POc reconstruction.
| POc | *bʷala | ‘say, speak’ | |
| NNG | Mato | bo | ‘say’ |
| NNG | Mato | bala | ‘tell (s.o. to do s.t.)’ |
| NNG | Gedaged | -bol | ‘speak’ |
| NNG | Takia | -bol | ‘say (s.t.), speak, tell story’ |
| NNG | Ulau-Suain | -bʷar | ‘speak’ |
| PT | Gumawana | bo-bʷala | ‘speak about (s.t.)’ |
| NCV | Maskelynes | bʷol (mai-i) | ‘tell (story to her/him)’ |
| Fij | Wayan | bolē | ‘offer to (do s.t.)’ |
It is possible that PWOc *sowa, *sowai- ‘say, speak’ was a reflex of PMP *sau ‘word; talk; conversation; language’ (ACD). Although the ACD’s gloss classes this as a noun, its non-Oceanic reflexes show that it was also a verb root.
| PWOc | *sowa, *sowai- | ‘say, speak’ | |
| NNG | Mangap | -so | ‘speak’ |
| NNG | Mangap | -so-soa | ‘speak’ |
| NNG | Sio | sowe | ‘speak’ |
| NNG | Mindiri | suawi | ‘speak’ |
| MM | Teop | sue | ‘say’ |
| MM | Tinputz | soē | ‘say (s.t.); parable’ |
| NCV | Mwotlap | so | [C] |
The cognate set supporting PEOc *bata ‘speak, utter’ is entirely from Bender et al. (2003b).
| PEOc | *bata | ‘speak, utter’ | |
| SES | Kwaio | bā(tafe-) | ‘praise, extol’ (tafe- ‘praise, cheer, applaud’) |
| SES | Sa’a | pā(lahe) | ‘praise’ (lahe- ‘praise, extol’) |
| PChk | *pata | ‘spoken, said, uttered’ (Bender el al. 2003b) | |
| Mic | Puluwatese | (a)paha | ‘say s.t.’ |
| Mic | Mortlockese | (a)pasa | ‘say s.t.’ |
| Mic | Mortlockese | (kka)pas | ‘word, speech, talk, language’ |
| Mic | Chuukese | (a)pasa | ‘speak, utter it’ |
| Mic | Chuukese | (kka)pas | ‘talk, speech, utterance, language; talk, speak’ |
| Mic | Satawalese | (a)pasa | ‘speak about it’ |
| Mic | Carolinian | (a)pasa | ‘say s.t.’ |
| Mic | Carolinian | (kka)pas | ‘word, speech, talk, language’ |
The reconstructed forms in this section appear to have been used both as report verbs and as influence verbs, as described in §12.1.
The most widely reflected of these is POc *waRa, *waRai- ‘say (to s.o.), tell (s.o.)’. The Mussau, Wuvulu (Adm) and Siar (MM) reflexes are known to be used as both report and influence verbs, the Araki (NCV) reflex as an influence verb, and the Mafea (NCV) reflex as a report verb. In Araki and NE Ambae the object is the addressee. In Mussau and Wuvulu the object is the complement. In Siar the object is the complement when warai is used as a report verb but the addressee when it is used as an influence verb. We have inferred that POc *waRai- behaved like Siar, as the other configurations can be derived from it via analogy, but this is weak evidence.
This verb was evidently already present in PEMP, as there is an EMP reflex, Dusner (CB) vre ‘say’.
| POc | *waRa, *waRai- | ‘say (s.t.), tell (s.o. to do s.t.)’ | |
| Adm | Mussau | ue | ‘say, tell’ |
| Adm | Wuvulu | ware | ‘say’ |
| Adm | Lou | war | ‘call’ |
| PT | Sudest | vare | ‘tell’ |
| MM | Sursurunga | wor | ‘speak’ (occurs only as first verb in a compound) |
| MM | Sursurunga | wor-wor | [VI] ‘talk, converse’ |
| MM | Siar | warai | [VT] ‘say (s.t.), tell (s.o. to do s.t.)’ |
| MM | Ramoaaina | wara-ŋa | [N, VI] ‘call, name’ (nominalisation) |
| MM | Label | wara | ‘speak’ |
| MM | Konomala | were-k | ‘speak’ |
| PSES | *waRa- | ‘speak’ (Geraghty 1990: 80) | |
| SES | Lau | kʷala | ‘curse, use bad language, mention human dung’ |
| SES | Lau | kʷala-ŋi- | ‘curse, swear at’ |
| SES | Kwaio | kʷala | ‘blame, accusation’ |
| SES | Kwaio | kʷala- | [N] ‘voice’ |
| SES | ’Are’are | wara | ‘speak’ |
| SES | ’Are’are | wara- | ‘word, voice, speech, sound, language’ |
| SES | Sa’a | wala- | ‘word, speech, voice, language’ |
| SES | Sa’a | wala-aʔi | [VT] ‘speak’ |
| SES | Sa’a | wala-ʔaŋa | ‘speech’ |
| SES | Ulawa | wala-ʔa | [N, VT] ‘speak’ (ADJ used as VERB) |
| SES | Arosi | (rai ni) wara | [N] ‘speech at a gathering to collect a debt’ |
| PNCV | *vʷara | ‘speak, say, call’ (Clark 2009) | |
| NCV | Mota | vʷara | ‘the cry of an owl; to cry in that way’ |
| NCV | Lolovoli | ware | ‘call (s.o.)’ (Catriona Malau, pers. comm.) |
| NCV | Raga | ware | ‘call, beckon’ |
| NCV | Kiai | vara-vara | ‘speak, talk’ |
| NCV | Kiai | vara | [N] ‘language, story’ |
| NCV | Araki | vara | ‘tell, say’ |
| NCV | Mafea | -varai | ‘tell’ |
| NCV | Sa | war | ‘speak, say’ |
| NCV | Nese | var | ‘tell, say’ |
| NCV | Big Nambas | -ð̼ara | ‘call out’ |
| NCV | Labo | wor | ‘yarn, tell stories, talk,’ |
| NCV | Naman | var | ‘say, think’ |
| NCV | Neve’ei | vʷer | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Uripiv | wera | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Rerep | forei | ‘says it’ |
| NCV | Nguna | pa-vara | ‘say’ |
| Pn | Takuu | vā- | [VT] ‘say’ |
| Pn | Hawaiian | wā | [N, VI] ‘make a noise; gossip, talk loudly back and forth, to reason’ |
It is difficult to see a difference in meaning between POc *pʷiti((r,R)), *pʷiti((r,R))i- ‘say (s.t.), tell (s.o. to do s.t.)’ below and POc *waRa, *waRai- above. Evidence that the former was used as both a report and an influence verb is relatively strong. Its reflexes in Buma, Tamambo, Paamese and Tirax are all used as both. Its reflexes in Mangap, Sursurunga and Vinitiri are used as influence verbs, those in Tolai and Lewo as report verbs.
The POc form was apparently inherited from PEMP, as there is a cognate in the Raja Ampat language Biga (= Misool), namely bitino ‘say’. As usual, the parentheses around stem-final *r, *R indicate that we cannot tell whether the POc consonant was *r or *R. The extra set of parentheses says that, as we have only reflex, Minigir vitiri, the presence of the stem-final consonant is uncertain.
| POc | *pʷiti((r,R)), *pʷiti((r,R))i- | ‘say (s.t.), tell (s.o. to do s.t.)’ | |
| NNG | Mangap | -pit | ‘talk; tell story’ |
| MM | Sursurunga | bit | ‘tell (s.o. to do s.t.)’ |
| MM | Minigir | vitiri | ‘say (that s.o. should do s.t.)’ (van der Mark 2007) |
| MM | Tolai | biti | [V, VC] ‘say’ |
| SES | Kahua | visi- | ‘say’ |
| PNCV | *viti | ‘speak, say’ (Clark 2009: *veti) | |
| NCV | Mota | vet | ‘say, speak, give the word; lead off (a song)’ |
| NCV | Nduindui | viti | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Nokuku | veti- | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Tamambo | viti | ‘speak, talk, tell story; say (to s.o. to do s.t.)’ |
| NCV | Tamambo | viti- | ‘tell (s.t.)’ (Jauncey 2011b: 397) |
| NCV | Paamese | vit | [V, C] ‘say’ (see §12.2) |
| NCV | Paamese | vite-ni- | ‘say (to s.o. to do s.t.)’ |
| NCV | Tirax | -vɛr | ‘say (to s.o. to do s.t.)’ |
| NCV | Labo | -mbiti | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Port Sandwich | uc | ‘speak, talk’ |
| NCV | Port Sandwich | uc-in-i | ‘speak somebody’ |
| NCV | Lewo | visi | ‘talk, pass on message’ |
| NCV | Baki | veri | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Bieria | mbetin | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Namakir | vet-og | ‘tell, say, speak’ |
Somewhat surprisingly only three high-order question verbs can be reconstructed, one each for POc, PWOc and PEOc. Why so few? In our construction data there are a number of languages for which we found no examples of indirect questions, probably because indirect speech is infrequent in texts, and indirect questions are rarer than report or influence constructions. On the other hand our search for question verbs in lexical sources found plenty, but they do not form cognate sets. How is this explained? Words that are less frequently used are replaced more rapidly than more frequently used words, and this is perhaps why there are so few question verb reconstructions, and why the reconstructions that can be inferred have relatively few reflexes.
A single question verb is tentatively reconstructed to POc, *nanasa, *nanasai- ‘ask’. Its question verb reflexes are restricted to WOc, as the Arosi reflex is not a question verb.
| POc | *nanasa, *nanasai- | ‘ask’ | |
| PT | Motu | he-nanadai | ‘ask’ |
| MM | Bola | nana, nane- | ‘ask’ |
| MM | Roviana | nanasa, nanasi- | ‘ask’ |
| MM | Hoava | nanasa-ni- | ‘request’ |
| SES | Arosi | nanasi | ‘wait for, expect’ |
It is hard to be sure of the meaning of PWOc *tore. Only the Lukep and Iduna reflexes are question verbs. The reflexes in the close relatives Maringe and Kokota are influence verbs, but this is not completely surprising, as the shift from ‘ask a question’ via ‘ask whether s.o. will do s.t.’ (still a question) to ‘ask s.o. to do s.t.’ (an influence construction) is intuitively quite probable, even if infrequent (see §12.1.2). The shift to a report verb in Notsi, however, is curious, but we would need far more than the available data in order to elucidate this.
If the Kwaio form reflects *to(r,R)e, then the reconstruction is promoted to POc.
| PWOc | *tore | ‘ask, enquire’ (?) | |
| NNG | Lukep | -toru | ‘ask’ |
| PT | Iduna | toli | ‘enquire’ |
| PT | Iduna | toli-ena | ‘enquire about s.t.’ |
| MM | Notsi | tole | ‘speak’ |
| MM | Maringe | tore | ‘ask for, make a request’ |
| MM | Maringe | tore-ni | ‘ask (s.o. to do s.t.)’ |
| MM | Kokota | tore- | ‘ask (s.o. to do s.t.)’ |
| SES | Kwaio | olisi- | ‘ask, question; replace’ |
PEOc *vaizu/*vaizuni- is a more solid reconstruction than either of those above.
| PEOc | *vaizu, *vaizuni- | ‘ask, enquire’ | |
| SES | West Guadalcanal | vesu- | ‘ask’ |
| SES | Talise | vaisu- | ‘ask’ |
| SES | Malango | veisu- | ‘ask’ |
| NCV | Lewo | viun | ‘ask’ |
| Pn | Tongan | fehuʔi | ‘ask, inquire’ |
| Pn | Nukuoro | heui | ‘ask question’ |
To the three reconstructions above, we add the following cognate set, but make no reconstruction, as there is a semantic mismatch between the three MM languages clustered around the St George Channel between southern New Ireland and northeastern New Britain, and the Malaita-Makira languages (SES). Reflexes in the St George languages are all glossed ‘ask’, whereas those in the Malaita-Makira languages are all report verbs. We are encouraged to think that they may reflect PSES *tili- by the fact that the one NCV reflex is also a report verb. This would allow us to reconstruct a POc speech act verb *tiRi-, but what exactly would it mean?
| MM | Ramoaaina | tiri | ‘ask’ |
| MM | Minigir | tiri | ‘ask’ |
| MM | Tolai | tir | ‘ask’ |
| SES | Longgu | ili- | ‘say it, tell it’ |
| SES | Lau | ili-ʔai- | ‘tell (news)’ |
| SES | Kwaio | ili- | ‘say, tell, think’ |
| SES | ’Are’are | iri- | ‘say, speak, talk, tell’ |
| SES | Oroha | iri | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Lelepa | til | ‘say’ |
It is not clear whether PNCV *usi- meant ‘ask (a question)’ or ‘ask (s.o. for s.t.)’. As noted above, the shift from ‘ask (a question)’ to ‘ask (s.o. for s.t.)’ is probable. A shift in the opposite direction seems less likely, so PNCV *usi is included here rather than in §12.3.4.
| PNCV | *usi | ‘ask’ (Clark 2009) | |
| NCV | Vurës | vör-us | ‘ask’ |
| NCV | Mota | var-us | ‘ask, enquire, enquire for’ |
| NCV | Baetora | usi | ‘ask’ |
| NCV | Nduindui | uhi | ‘ask’ |
| NCV | Nokuku | usi | ‘ask, ask for’ |
| NCV | Tolomako | usi | ‘call, invite’ |
| NCV | Kiai | usi- | ‘ask, ask for’ |
| NCV | Tangoa | a-usi | ‘ask’ |
| NCV | Mafea | -us | ‘ask’ |
| NCV | Paamese | vīsi- | [VT] ‘ask (s.o. for s.t.)’ |
| NCV | Nese | us | ‘ask (s.o.)’ |
| NCV | Naman | us-us | ‘ask (a question), ask (s.o. for s.t.)’ |
| NCV | Neve’ei | wus-wus | ‘ask (s.o.)’ |
| NCV | Uripiv | os-us-i | ‘ask’ |
| NCV | Maskelynes | -us | [VT] ‘ask’ |
PPn had two question verbs that are reflected across the whole subgroup: *huqi ‘ask (a question)’ and *sili ‘ask questions’.
| PPn | *huqi | ‘ask (a question)’ | |
| Pn | Tongan | fe-huʔi- | ‘ask’ |
| Pn | Nukuoro | he-ui- | ‘question carefully’ |
| Pn | Pukapukan | ui | ‘ask’ |
| Pn | Rarotongan | ui | ‘ask’ |
| Pn | Tahitian | ui | ‘to question’ |
| Pn | Tuamotuan | ui | ‘ask a question’ |
| Pn | Hawaiian | ui | ‘ask’ |
| Pn | Māori | ui | ‘ask, enquire’ |
| Pn | Marquesan | ui | ‘to question’ |
| Pn | Mangarevan | ui | ‘to question’ |
| PPn | *sili | ‘ask questions’ | |
| Pn | Tongan | fe-hili | ‘ask’ |
| Pn | Samoan | fe-sili | ‘ask, question, inquire’ |
| Pn | East Futunan | ve-sili | ‘ask’ |
| Pn | Luangiua | va-sili | ‘ask’ |
| Pn | Pileni | fe-ili-a | ‘ask’ |
| Pn | Pukapukan | yili-yili | ‘ask, question’ |
| Pn | Rennellese | he-sigi | ‘ask questions, inquire’ |
| Pn | Tikopia | siri | ‘ask, inquire’ |
| Pn | Tikopia | fe-siri | ‘ask, inquire’ |
| Pn | Tokelauan | fe-hili | ‘question, inquire’ |
It was noted in §12.3.2 that there appear to have been POc verbs that served as both report and influence verbs. We also mentioned in §12.3.3 that some question verbs meaning ‘ask (s.o. a question)’ seem to have had the influence sense ‘ask (s.o. to do s.t.)’. This leaves only a few other influence verbs, all meaning ‘ask s.o. for s.t.’, ‘ask s.o. to give self s.t.’.
The two sets supporting POc *noŋi and PEOc *noqi below entail some formal puzzles. In fact, we infer that they have a single origin, but we have few data to undergird this inference.
The regular reflex of PMP *ŋeni is POc *ŋoni, but the latter is reflected only in Labu and in an alternant Arosi form. All other Oceanic forms reflect a metathesised *noŋi, the form reconstructed by Milke (1968). We surmise with Blust (ACD) that Arosi ŋoni may be a chance (re)metathesis.
The second set, reflecting putative PEOc *noqi, is suspect on two grounds. First, it is reflected only in Guadalcanal (in Ghari and Tolo) and in Pn languages. Gela, in the same major subgroup within SES as Ghari and Tolo, reflects *noŋi. Second, the Ghari and Tolo forms are not regular cognates of PPn *noqi. The expected cognate form is †noɣi or †noi.
A possible explanation of the the Ghari and Tolo forms is that speakers reanalysed reflexes of *noŋi as transitives. In many EOc languages the transitive is marked by -Ci, where C is one of several consonants, and so *noŋi was apparently reanalysed as *no-ŋi, giving an intransitive root *no, reflected in Ghari. This *no in turn became the root of newly innovated transitives like *no-ki (cf Tolo noki) or PPn *no-qi.
There is another minor complication in the reflexes of POc *noŋi. The Central Papuan languages Aroma, Motu, Gabadi and Roro have forms that could reflect *noŋi, *noki or *noqi. They are interpreted as reflexes of *noŋi because this is the source of all other WOc forms.
| PMP | *ŋeni | ‘beg, ask for’ (ACD) | |
| POc | *noŋi, *ŋoni | ‘beg, ask (for s.t.)’ (Milke 1968: *noŋi; ACD: *ŋoni) | |
| NNG | Tami | noŋ | ‘beg’ |
| NNG | Labu | ŋʊ- | ‘ask’ |
| NNG | Mangseng | noŋ | ‘beg, pray, shout’ |
| PT | Aroma | noɣi-noɣi | ‘beg’ |
| PT | Motu | -noi- | [VT] ‘ask for s.t.’ |
| PT | Gabadi | noi-noi | ‘ask for, beg’ |
| PT | Roro | noi-noi | ‘beg’ |
| MM | East Kara | nuŋ | ‘ask a favour; pray to a spirit’ |
| MM | Label | nuŋ | ‘ask for’ |
| SES | Gela | noŋi | ‘ask for’ |
| SES | Gela | noŋi- | ‘ask him, ask for s.t.’ |
| SES | Arosi | ŋoni, noŋi | ‘ask for, beg’ |
| SES | Owa | noŋi | [VT] ‘ask for s.t.’ |
| PEOc | *noqi | ‘ask for, beg’ (?) | |
| SES | Ghari | no-no | ‘ask for’ |
| SES | Tolo | noki- | ‘ask for, request’ |
| PEPn | *noqi | ‘ask for, solicit’ (POLLEX) | |
| Pn | Pukapukan | noi-noi | ‘be greedy’ |
| Pn | Rapanui | no-noʔi | ‘ask, beg, request, implore, pray, solicit’ |
| Pn | Rarotongan | noi-noi | ‘covet, desire greedily’ |
| Pn | Māori | (i)noi | ‘beg, ask for s.t.’ |
| Pn | Hawaiian | noi | ‘ask for s.t., make a request’ |
Compared with the above, POc *suga, *sugai- ‘ask s.o. for .s.t.’ is a straightforward reconstruction.
| POc | *suga, *sugai- | ‘ask s.o. for .s.t.’ | |
| NNG | Mangap | suŋ | [VI] ‘ask s.o. for .s.t.’ |
| MM | Tolai | uge | ‘agree; sing in tune with s.o.’ |
| PSES | *suga, *sug(a,e)ti- | ‘desire (s.t.), ask for (s.t.)’ | |
| SES | Gela | huga, hugati | ‘keep talking about a gift’ |
| SES | Birao | suŋeti- | ‘ask’ |
| SES | Talise | suge | ‘ask’ |
| SES | ’Are’are | suka | ‘ask to be given (s.t.)’ |
| SES | Sa’a | suke | ‘beg, ask for (s.t.), borrow, ask permission’ |
| SES | Arosi | sukat- | ‘long for, grieve for’ |
| Fij | Bauan | suge | ‘try to obtain, stir s.o. up’ |
POc *taman ‘ask’ is something of a mystery, in two respects. First, we cannot provide a more specific gloss than ‘ask’ because only the non-Admiralties reflexes below have extended glosses. Second, the initial consonant of the Admiralties reflexes other than Seimat—members of the Eastern Admiralties subgroup—reflects Proto E Admiralty *ntaman. Whilst initial prenasalisation is expected on a noun, it is not expected on a verb (Ross 1988:337–341).
| POc | *taman | ‘ask’ | |
| Adm | Seimat | ame-i | ‘ask’ |
| Adm | Nyindrou | dremeñ-a | ‘ask, question’ |
| Adm | Loniu | temen-ani | [VT] ‘ask’ |
| Adm | Bipi | damen | ‘ask’ |
| Adm | Sori-Harengan | dimeŋ | ‘ask’ |
| MM | Maringe | tamn-ai | ‘prayer, church service’ (-ai < POc *-aki) |
| Fij | Wayan | taman-i | ‘ask s.o. to give services/help in a considerable task’ |
It is possible that Longgu alaŋaʔi, Lau alaŋai, Wayan Fijian ala and Bauan Fijian yala reflect a PEOc *ala(ŋ) ‘promise’. Otherwise no reconstructions of commitment verbs have been made. One reason for this is that commitment verbs are the least frequently occurring of the four complement-taking classes of speech act verbs (§12.1.1). Another is that verbs meaning ‘promise’ are often compounds, as listed in (25).14 There is some evidence (Tolo, Tamambo, Lolovoli) that there was a PEOc term for ‘promise’ made up of the verbs ‘say’ and ‘put’ (POc *taRu(q), vol.5:449).
| language | speech act expression | gloss | semi-literal gloss |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mangap | mbuk sua pa A pa B | ‘promise A regarding B’ | tie talk to A about B |
| Yabem | sʊm su | ‘promise (s.t.)’ | say away |
| Motu | gʷau-ha-mata | ‘promise’ | say-CAUSATIVE-foremost |
| Teop | sue vaovoi | ‘promise (s.t.)’ | say bless |
| Zabana | nakai uŋene | ‘promise (s.t.)’ | leave speak |
| Tolo | koe talu | ‘promise (s.t.)’ | say put |
| Tamambo | viti tauhi | ‘promise (s.t.)’ | say put-TR |
| Lolovoli | vara-tau | ‘promise (s.t.)’ | say(?)-put |
| Lewo | visa-ari | ‘promise’ | say-DURATION |
When speakers use an expressive speech act verb, they categorise the intention or meaning of a speech act. For this reason most expressive speech act verbs are not followed by a complement clause
The single verb in this category refers to interactive conversational structure. A questioning speech act requires an answer and an influencing speech act requires agreement to do what the influencer wants. That is, the first speaker looks for a co-operative response from the addressee, and this response is the meaning of POc *taRam, *taRami- ‘answer, agree’.
A minor formal mystery is that final -m of the root seems to have become *-mʷ- in the transitive form in NCV (Clark 2009).
The Admiralties forms under ‘cf. also’ seem at first sight to be reflexes of *taRami. However, they reflect a putative POc †*ja(Ra)mʷi, and we are at a loss as to how to explain the difference in the initial consonant from POc *t-.
| PEMP | *taRam | [V] ‘answer, agree’ | |
| CB | Biak | karem | ‘answer, assent’ |
| POc | *taRam, *taRami- | ‘allow, agree, co-operate’ | |
| NNG | Yabem | tɪlam | [N, VI] ‘shout over distance’ |
| PT | Misima | talam | ‘let, allow, permit, give’ |
| PT | Saliba | talam | [N, VI] ‘answer’ |
| MM | Sursurunga | taram | [VI] ‘obey, cooperate; go along with, accede to’ |
| MM | Sursurunga | tərmai | [VT] ‘obey’ |
| MM | Ramoaaina | taram | ‘obey, agree, serve, answer to a call’ |
| MM | Patpatar | taram | ‘obey, listen, hear’ |
| MM | Tolai | tarami | [N, VI, VT] ‘obey, agree, consent’ |
| SES | Gela | tala- | [VT] ‘answer; allow, permit; agree, be willing’ |
| SES | Gela | talam-aɣi | [VT] ‘agree to, allow, obey’ |
| SES | Kwaio | ala | ‘agree’ |
| SES | Kwaio | alami- | ‘allow, permit’ |
| SES | ’Are’are | arami- | [VT] ‘permit, consent, allow’ (ACD) |
| SES | Sa’a | ʔala, ʔala-ʔala | ‘answer, obey, give attention to’ |
| SES | Arosi | ara | ‘answer, agree mutually’ |
| SES | Arosi | arami- | [VT] ‘answer, acknowledge, assent to’ |
| PNCV | *taRamʷi | ‘allow, accept, agree’ (Clark 2009) | |
| NCV | Mota | tarama | [N, VI] ‘answer a call’ |
| NCV | Mota | taram-aɣ | [N, VI] ‘answer another’ |
| NCV | Nokuku | tami, tame | ‘answer’ |
| NCV | Kiai | tame | ‘allow, consent’ |
| NCV | Araki | raɾami | ‘meaning, symbolic or magic significance’ |
| NCV | Tamambo | darami | ‘answer s.o.’ |
| NCV | West Ambrym | rɛma, rɛma-nɛ | ‘allow, let, agree (to)’ |
| NCV | Port Sandwich | ⁿramʷ-ini | ‘let, permit’ |
| NCV | Atchin | tamʷe | ‘salute, welcome, receive’ |
| NCV | Lewo | tamʷ-ani | ‘allow, permit, vote for; agree to, lend to, admit, confess’ (-ani TRANSITIVE) |
| Adm | Lou | samʷi | ‘answer’ |
| Adm | Titan | camʷi | [VT] ‘agree, permit, reply’ |
| Adm | Loniu | cumʷi | ‘agree with’ |
Storytelling was an important activity in perhaps all traditional Oceanic-speaking societies. The PNPn term *[ka]kai ‘traditional story’ is reconstructed in §12.3.1 above under POc *kʷa, *kʷai- ‘say, tell’. In §6.3.7 two speech-act verbs meaning ‘tell a story’ are reconstructed: POc *takunu ‘tell a story, narrate’ and PPn *tala ‘tell stories; tale, story’.
In a small community where many of the people one relates to are within hailing distance, calling out is a fairly frequent occurrence. It seems to fall into two distinct speech acts: calling out to greet or welcome someone (§12.4.3.1) and calling out to attract attention (§12.4.3.2).
The verb for calling out a greeting was evidently POc *paila/*pela. The form *paila is reflected only in Iduna, but the unidirectionality of sound change means that it is the older form, and *pela is (only slightly?) more recent.
| POc | *paila, *pela | ‘greet/welcome loudly; exclamation of welcome’ | |
| POc | *pelapela | ‘shout, exclaim’ (ACD) | |
| Adm | Drehet | pele | ‘voice’ |
| NNG | Kaulong | pel | ‘shout, yell’ |
| NNG | Takia | pele | ‘greeting, welcome exclamation’ |
| PT | Iduna | -faina(ena) | ‘shout at, abuse angrily’ |
| MM | Nakanai | bela-bela | ‘talk about, gossip’ (b- for †p- or †v-) |
| MM | Halia | ele | ‘speak strongly, loudly, speak with authority’ (zero for †p or †h) |
| MM | Roviana | vela-vela | ‘shout (as an official at a gathering, or in anger, etc.)’ |
| SES | Longgu | velo- | ‘rouse on, get cross with’ |
| SV | Anejom̃ | pec | ‘greeting, reply to pō’ (pō ’greeting to s.o. met suddenly)15 |
| Fij | Bauan | velavela | ‘interjection of surprise’ |
The only other form reconstructable with this meaning is POc *kʷaro, for which just three reflexes are known to us.
| POc | *kʷaro | ‘call out a greeting’ | |
| Adm | Lou | -uaro | ‘hail, call out’ |
| Adm | Nauna | -ualu-y | ‘call out, hail (s.o.)’ |
| MM | Patpatar | karo | ‘shout at (s.o.) with words or beckoning) as a greeting’ |
Two POc terms and one PEOc term meaning ‘call out to s.o.’ can be reconstructed. The first, *pato, *patoli- ‘say or call s.o.’s name; say, speak’ seems to be focussed on the act of calling itself. The second, *soRo(p) ‘call, summon’ also includes the intention to attract someone’s attention or to summon them. The third, *kai has a similar meaning to *soRo(p), but the glosses of its reflexes suggest an added element of forcefulness.
The *-l- of *patoli-, the transitive form, is reconstructed on the basis of the stem-final consonants of the Mangap, Kwaio and Arosi transitive reflexes.
| POc | *pato, *patoli- | ‘say or call s.o.’s name; say, speak’ | |
| NNG | Mangap | -patil-i | ‘keep calling s.o.’s name’ |
| NNG | Mengen | pato | ‘say’ |
| NNG | Mengen | pato-e | [V] ‘address s.o., call, name’ |
| NNG | Takia | -pate | ‘confer a name, call out (s.t.), say s.o.’s name’ |
| PT | Sudest | varo-varo | ‘call’ |
| PT | Gumawana | vatoi | [N, VT] ‘say s.t.’ (-i TR) |
| PT | Saroa | vato | [V] ‘to mention, say’ |
| PT | Motu | hato- | ‘pronounce a name’ |
| MM | Lamasong | pata | ‘say’ |
| MM | Tinputz | vatō | ‘talk’ |
| MM | Torau | ato | ‘speak’ |
| MM | Hoava | pato | ‘say’ |
| SES | Gela | patopato | ‘forbid’ |
| SES | Kwaio | faol-eʔenia | ‘talk out against, talk about one’s failure to meet norms of kinship obligation’ |
| SES | Arosi | haor-aʔi | [VI] ‘give a name to’ |
| Mic | Woleaian | ffas | [VI] ‘call’ |
| Fij | Bauan | vato | ‘utter a wish; invoke evil with a ceremony’ |
Putative stem-final *-p of POc *soRo(p), *soRo(p)i- below is reconstructed on the basis of the stem-final consonants of the Arosi and Wayan Fijian transitive reflexes. However, the consonant can be reconstructed with certainty only for PEOc, as the only non-EOc transitive form, Minaveha hone-i, lacks a stem-final consonant.
| POc | *soRo(p), *soRo(p)i- | ‘call, summon’ | |
| NNG | Mapos Buang | rɔ̄ | ‘express love, greet, send greetings’ |
| PT | Minaveha | hone-i | ‘call s.o.’ |
| MM | Tolai | oro | ‘call’ |
| SES | Gela | holo- | [VT] ‘call, name’ |
| SES | Tolo | solo- | [VT] ‘beckon, call by gesture’ |
| SES | Arosi | toro | ‘shout, give news’ |
| SES | Arosi | toroh-aʔi | [VT] ‘shout to (s.o.)’ |
| NCV | Araki | soɾo | [V; N] ‘talk, say; language, dialect’ |
| NCV | Araki | soɾoh-i | ‘speak of, mention’ |
| Mic | Chuukese | -o-sɔra, o-sɔrēy | ‘call, cause to be summoned’ |
| Fij | Wayan | ðō | ‘call, call out’ |
| Fij | Wayan | ðōv-i- | ‘call s.o. or s.t.. to come’ |
| Fij | Wayan | ðōv-akini- | ‘call for s.o. or s.t.’ |
Although the forms listed below look as if they could be reflexes of POc *kʷa, *kʷai- ‘say, tell’ (§12.3.1), on closer inspection this is implausible, first because the base form of the reconstruction below is clearly *kai, whereas the base form of the reconstruction in §12.3.1 is *kʷa, and second because there is a clear difference in meaning between the set in §12.3.1 and the set below. Also to be noted is an extension of the meaning to the vocalisations of animals in the southernmost languages of the set, Nguna and Xârâcùù.
| PEOc | *kai | ‘call out to (s.o.), say forcefully’ | |
| Proto Malaita-Makira | *ɣai, *ɣai(li)- | ‘shout to s.o., insist on s.t.’ | |
| SES | Longgu | aili- | ‘call s.o.’ |
| SES | To’aba’ita | ʔai | ‘shout, yell, call out’ |
| SES | To’aba’ita | ʔaili- | ‘shout to s.o., call s.o.’ |
| SES | Kwaio | ʔai- | ‘insist, force’ |
| SES | Kwaio | ʔai-taʔi | ‘be insistent, insist on s.t.’ |
| SES | Arosi | ʔai, ʔaiʔai- | ‘incite, urge’ |
| PNCV | *kai | ‘call out (to s.o.), vocalise loudly’ (Clark 2009: ‘call out’) | |
| NCV | Raga | (bi-)ɣai-ɣai | ‘argue’ |
| NCV | Southeast Ambrym | kei | ‘call’ |
| NCV | Lonwolwol | ke | ‘call, call out, mention’ |
| NCV | Big Nambas | ɣai | ‘sing’ |
| NCV | Nāti | ʔāi | ‘call, shout to’ |
| NCV | Uripiv | -kai | ‘cry out, shout’ |
| NCV | Rerep | ke | ‘cry out, shout, cooee’ |
| NCV | Rerep | ke-ke | ‘sing’ |
| NCV | Port Sandwich | kai | ‘call s.o.’ |
| NCV | Port Sandwich | ka-kai | ‘sing’ |
| NCV | Nguna | kai | ‘cry, sing (birds)’ |
| NCal | Xârâcùù | xa | ‘speak, bark, sound’ |
In any human community there are inevitably some speech acts that are perceived as unpleasant. These are the subject of this section, §12.4.5 and §12.4.6.
Blust’s reconstruction of PWMP *kunu ‘it is said, people say…’ (ACD) as an impersonal expression is supported by his western Malayo-Polynesian reflexes. He also cites Arosi ʔunu as a reflex, and this clearly belongs to the SES cognate set below. POc *kunu can be reconstructed, but without Admiralties or WOc reflexes its gloss is uncertain.
| PMP | *kunu | ‘it is said, people say…’ (ACD) | |
| PSES | *kunu | ‘gossip, talk negatively about s.o.’ | |
| SES | Gela | kunu, kunuhi- | ‘beg’ |
| SES | Kwaio | kunu- | ‘gossip about be jealous of; accuse of infidelity’ |
| SES | Sa’a | ʔunua | ‘say, bid, tell, reckon’ |
| SES | Arosi | ʔunu | ‘speak, name, call’ |
| SES | Arosi | ʔunu-ʔunu | ‘slander, gossip, talk angrily, quarrel’ |
The verb reconstructed below is reflected only in NNG and MM languages. The gloss ‘speak negatively or scornfully to (s.o.)’ is reconstructed on the basis of the Buang and Nakanai forms. They are far enough apart geographically and genealogically to be independent pieces of evidence. In the Schouten languages Wogeo and Manam, reflexes of *pile have lost their negative element and are verbs of speaking in general. The Kaulong reflex, it seems, cannot be explained without more local knowledge.
| PWOc | *pile | ‘speak negatively or scornfully to (s.o.)’ | |
| NNG | Kaulong | pil | ‘sing to warn others of one’s presence, whistle to lure game’ |
| NNG | Wogeo | -fila-fila | ‘speak’ |
| NNG | Manam | pile | [VI] ‘say; speak, talk’ |
| NNG | Buang | plɛ | ‘scoff, mock, inspect, examine’ |
| MM | Nakanai | vile | [N, VI] ‘scorn, be critical of’ |
Working with dictionaries, it becomes obvious that many Oceanic-speaking communities recognised various degrees of lie-telling, rather like English fib, white lie and lie. Unfortunately, the available data do not allow us to rank the eight verbs of lie-telling reconstructed below, although POc *balau stands out as having a more specific gloss than the others.
| POc | *rupʷas, *rupʷasi- | ‘tell lies to s.o., deceive s.o.’ | |
| NNG | Takia | -rpai | ‘tell’ |
| PT | Tawala | luposi | ‘lies regarding sex’ |
| PT | Saliba | lupoi | ‘trick s.o.’ (Margetts 1999: 280) |
| MM | Roviana | rupasa | ‘using different words to convey a certain meaning’ |
| NCV | Paamese | luvos | [VI] ‘tell lies, pretend’ (-s unexpectedly retained) |
| NCV | Paamese | luvosi | [VT] ‘trick, deceive; lie to’ |
| Mic | Kosraean | læfʌ | [VT] ‘deny, deceive; disclaim, contradict’ (-f- for †0̸) |
The three items that follow have few reflexes, but they are in each case sufficiently distributed genealogically for, respectively, a POc, a PEOc and a PCP reconstruction ro be made.
| POc | *koron | ‘lie, tell a lie’ (ACD) | |
| Adm | Mussau | koron-ana | ‘false; lie’ (-ana ADJECTIVISER) |
| NNG | Gedaged | koɬ | ‘rumour, hearsay, tittle-tattle, gossip’ |
| NNG | Manam | koro, koro-koro | ‘lie, tell a lie’ |
| PEOc | *sori(t) | ‘lie, tell a lie’ | |
| SES | Gela | sori | ‘lie deliberately, cheat’ |
| SES | Gela | sori-sori | ‘false, lying’ |
| Fij | Wayan | ðori | ‘lie, tell lie/falsehood, fib’ |
| Fij | Wayan | ðori-ðori | ‘tell lies; a liar’ |
| Fij | Wayan | ðoriti- | ‘lie to (s.o.), deceive (s.o.)’ |
| Pn | Māori | hori | ‘speak falsely; false, untrue’ |
| PCP | *lasu | ‘tell a lie, deceive’ | |
| Fij | Bauan | lasu | [V; ADJ; N] ‘tell a lie; false; a lie’ |
| Pn | Luangiua | lahu | ‘trick, deceive’ |
POc *lami seems to have added an element of temptation or enticement to the telling of a lie.
| POc | *lami | ‘tell a lie’ | |
| MM | Sursurunga | lem | ‘lie’ (lem is more serious than fibbing, but less serious than strong lying) |
| MM | Ramoaaina | lami | ‘tempt, tantalise, by offering and withdrawing’ |
| MM | Tolai | ləm | ‘entice, deceive, coax, tempt, decoy, tantalise, lead astray’ |
| Fij | Bauan | lami | ‘tell a lie’ (archaic) |
| Pn | Tongan | lami | ‘conceal from sight’ |
Finally, POc *balau has non-Pn reflexes that appear simply to mean ‘lie’, but Pn reflexes that roughly mean ‘lie by exaggeration’. Unfortunately, evidence that would narrow down the meaning reflected in non-Pn languages is not known to us.
| POc | *balau | ‘lie (by exaggeration?)’ | |
| Adm | Lou | parawa | [N; ADJ] ‘lie; false’ (-r- for †-l-) (Blust 1998b) |
| NNG | Kairiru | bil | ‘lie’ |
| SES | Bugotu | pilau | ‘deceive’ (POLLEX) |
| SES | Bugotu | pia-pilau | ‘tell a lie’ (POLLEX) |
| PPn | *palau | ‘lie by exaggeration’ (POLLEX) | |
| Pn | Tongan | pālau | ‘talk much, do little’ |
| Pn | Rarotongan | parau | ‘pride, conceit’ |
| Pn | Hawaiian | pālau | ‘tell tall tales, exaggerate’ |
Speech manner verbs are those which refer to the manner in which an utterance is produced, without assigning a particular significance to the utterance,. The reconstructions in this section denote speaking loudly or shouting, whispering, stammering and speaking a foreign language or something that sounds like one.
The evidence for POc *kabat ‘call or speak loudly’ is drawn almost entirely from Micronesian reflexes, but the apparent cognacy of Lou (Adm) kapat ‘speak out’ and Nakanai (MM) aba ‘call, announce (loudly)’ makes this a POc term. However, the Lou and Nakanai terms attest to POc *kapʷat (or possibly *kabʷat), while the Micronesian forms reflect *kapʷata, with unexplained final *-a. Vangunu kepoto ‘say’ is shown under ‘cf. also’ because its gloss doesn’t match those of other cognates. It is a regular reflex of POc *kapʷat.
| POc | *kapʷat | ‘call or speak loudly’ | |
| Adm | Lou | kapat | ‘speak out’ |
| MM | Nakanai | aba | ‘call, announce , esp. loudly’ |
| PChk | *kapʷata | ‘call loudly, shout’ (Bender 2003b) | |
| Mic | Chuukese | apʷas, akkapʷas | ‘shout or cry wehuhu as an exclamation at falling down or narrowly escaping an accident’ |
| Mic | Puluwatese | yapʷah | ‘shout’ |
| Mic | Puluwatese | yakkapʷaha | ‘shout’ |
| Mic | Carolinian | abʷas, akkabʷas | ‘shout, call loudly’ |
| Mic | Carolinian | abʷasǣxæli | ‘call loudly to s.o., call over to s.o.’ |
| Mic | Satawalese | apʷəs, akkapʷasa | ‘scream, shout’ |
| Mic | Woleaian | xefʷata | ‘yell, shout, bark’ |
| Mic | Pulo Annian | kkavʷatɨ | ‘scream, shout’ |
| MM | Vangunu | kepoto | ‘say’ |
Only a few reflexes of POc *ŋulu ‘in a whisper’, *ŋulu-ŋulu (v) ‘whisper’ are known to us, but their distribution requires a POc reconstruction.
| POc | *ŋulu | ‘in a whisper’ | |
| POc | *ŋulu-ŋulu | [V] ‘whisper’ | |
| Adm | Loniu | (-pʷa)ŋunu-ŋun | [VI] ‘whisper’ (-pʷa ‘say’) |
| NNG | Sio | ŋuru-ŋuru | ‘whisper’ |
| SES | Kwaio | (kʷala)ŋulu | ‘whisper’ (kʷala ‘speak’) |
| SES | ’Are’are | (wai)nuru | ‘murmur, whisper’ (wai does not occur independently) |
| SES | Bugotu | ŋuŋū | ‘whisper’ (†-l- is absent) |
It is possible that the two terms for ‘stammer’ below are independent innovations. A verb ta ‘speak’ occurs in Bola and Tolai, and it is possible that tata and tatata are onomatopoeic formations based on it.
| PEOc | *[ta]tata | ‘stammer’ (?) | |
| SES | Gela | tatata | ‘stammer’ |
| Fij | Bauan | tata | ‘stammer, speak indistinctly’ |
The two reconstructions below are verbs meaning ‘talk in a foreign languages’, but some reflexes of PROc *kato are perhaps metaphorical variations on the meaning. Proto Micronesian appears to have changed the final vowel from *-o to *-a.
It is just possible that PPn *kote does reflect PROc *kato, but with unexpected changes in its vowels.
| PROc | *kato | [V] ‘speak a foreign language’; [N] ‘speech, language, foreign language’ | |
| NCV | Vurës | ɣat | ‘say’ |
| NCV | Mwotlap | ɣatɣat | [V; N] ‘speak, speak another language; language, dialect’ |
| NCV | Mota | ɣato | [V; N] ‘speak, speak another language, talk nonsense in delirium; foreign language’ |
| NCV | Lolovoli | kato | ‘talk, speak’ |
| PMic | *kata | [N] ‘speech, language, foreign language’; [V] ‘talk, chatter, talk a foreign language’ (Bender 2003a: ‘talk loudly’) | |
| Mic | Kosraean | kæs | [N] ‘word, speech, language’ |
| Mic | Kosraean | kæs-kæs | [V] ‘talk, chirp repeatedly’ |
| Mic | Kiribati | kaka(rabakau) | ‘talk together, conspire, plot insurrection’ (*t > k after *k) |
| Mic | Marshallese | kac, kkac-kac | [N] ‘idiom, language, motto, pun, saying, slang’ |
| Mic | Carolinian | kkas, kkasa- | [N] ‘language, speech’ |
| Mic | Chuukese | kasa-kas | ‘talk aloud’ |
| Mic | Woleaian | kkase | [N; V] ‘speak in foreign language; foreign language’ |
| PPn | *kote | ‘talk incomprehensibly, talk in a foreign language’ | |
| Pn | Tongan | kote | [VI] ‘talk in a foreign language, talk jargon’ |
| Pn | Samoan | ʔote | ‘scold, tell s.o. off’ |
| Pn | East Futunan | kote | ‘talk in a foreign language’ |
| Pn | Tikopia | kotē | ‘babble, chatter’ |
| Pn | West Futunan | kote | ‘speak a foreign language’ |
| Pn | Māori | kote-kote | ‘make a smacking noise with lips’ |
In a number of Oceanic languages verbs with a report sense (§12.3.1) are also used like English ‘think’, in the sense of ‘opine’, as we noted in vol.5:542–544:
… OPINE is quite often expressed by a language’s default verb of saying, so that in Baluan (Adm), for example, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the speaker intends the complement of pʷa to be spoken or simply thought (Dineke Schokkin, pers. comm.).
This is also true of Mangap (NNG) -so ‘say, think’. Bugenhagen & Bugenhagen (2007) gloss the Mangap sentence in (26) as both ‘I say that is not good’ and ‘I think that is not good’.
| nio | aŋ-so | ina | aᵐbai | som | |
| I | 1SG-say | that.DEM | good | not |
The Äiwoo (TM) verb -kæ/kɒ- is also used in both senses (Næss 2016:48–49):
| kä | demo | kä | pæko | |
| say.ITR | hermit.crab | say | okay |
| kɒ-mʷæ | idoo | |
| say.TR-A:2A | what |
The Äiwoo verb -kæ/kɒ- has a further extension of meaning: it is also used in the sense of ‘want’ (Næss 2016:49):
| kɒ-mʷæ | mi-kuwæ | ñɒ? | |
| say-A:2A | S:2A-go | where |
Verbs of speaking in a number of Oceanic languages are also used in the sense of ‘want’ or ‘intend’, as the following sentence examples show.
| yu | u-pe | k-u-le | |
| D:1S | S:1S-say | IRR-S:1S-go |
| ae | ga-be | ya-ᵑgom | |
| D:1S | S:1S-say | S:1S-IRR:do |
| ne-vere | ne-va | |
| S:1S-IRR:say | S:1S-IRR:go |
The hallmark of this construction in the last three examples is that when the verb of saying is used in this sense, it is followed by an irrealis complement.16
Intuitively it seems likely that the sequence of extensions was ‘say’ > ‘think’ > ‘want’/ ‘intend’, but the evidence is insufficient to test this.
It seems likely that at least POc *pʷa, *pʷai- ‘say, tell’ and *pʷaca(q), *pʷaca(q)i- ‘speak, say’ were used in these senses. It might be argued that in the ‘think’ and ‘want’/‘intend’ senses, these are no longer speech act verbs, as nothing is actually uttered. However, the extensions of meaning occur precisely because speakers apprehend thinking and wanting as unuttered speech.
The following list of examples where ‘say’ can also mean ‘think’ or ‘want’/‘intend’ is expanded from that given in vol.5:544. A number of these verbs are listed in the cognate sets in §12.3.1.
| Adm | Baluan | pʷa | [VT] ‘say, express, think’ |
| Adm | Lou | pa | [VT] ‘say, want’ |
| Adm | Nyindrou | aña | ‘think, say’ |
| Adm | Kele | pe | ‘say, wish, intend’ |
| NNG | Yabem | -be | ‘say, want, will, desire, like, mean, think, intend’ |
| NNG | Numbami | -ᵑgo | ‘say, scold (s.o.), tell (s.t.), talk (to s.o.), intend (to do s.t.)’ |
| NNG | Bariai | oaga | ‘think, say’ |
| NNG | Kaulong | vo | ‘talk, say, speak; suppose, intend’ |
| NNG | Mangap | -so | ‘say, speak, communicate, talk, tell; think’ |
| NNG | Kairiru | wot | ‘say; intend, wish’ |
| PT | Iamalele | vo | ‘say, think’; (= C) |
| MM | Nakanai | vei | ‘think, opine, talk, tell, say’ |
| MM | Sursurunga | ŋo- | ‘say, think’ |
| MM | Teop | boha | ‘think, say’ |
| SES | Gela | ne | ‘say, think’ |
| SES | To’aba’ita | sore- | ‘say, think’ |
| SES | Kwaio | ili- | ‘say, tell, think’ |
| TM | Äiwoo | -kæ, kɒ- | [VI,VT] ‘say, want’ |
| NCV | Lamen | vere | ‘say, want’ |
It is noted that expressions like ‘I want/hope/wish’ sometimes take the form of a body-part metaphor like those described in volume 5, ch.9. This metaphor is literally translatable as ‘my insides say’. Examples are:
| ilo-g | i-bol… | |
| insides-P:1S | S:3S-say |
| ŋo-i | i | bəl | |
| say-TR | TOPIC | stomach |
In the foregoing sections 22 POc speech act verbs have been reconstructed, along with two PWOc, six PEOc, four PPn and one each for PSES, PNCV and PCP. In making this count only a cognate set’s highest-order reconstruction has been counted. Reconstructions at levels older than POc have been ignored.
These numbers are low in comparison with the multiplicity of speech act verbs in the Fijian languages or in English, a fact accounted for by paucity of data17 and the presence of numerous compound speech act expressions in some, perhaps many, Oceanic languages (§12.1.3). Gaps in the data prevent us making a more specific generalisation. In the discussion of compound expressions in §12.3.5 we noted that PEOc perhaps had a compound speech act expression for ‘promise’ consisting of the verbs ‘say’ and ‘put’. Further research would probably lead to further findings of this kind.
We have also examined the grammatical behaviour of speech act verbs (§12.1.2), and seen that the same verb used with different grammatical constructions may have distinct senses. Understanding this behaviour and its grammaticalisation allows us to recognise that at least some complementisers are derived from verbs (§12.2).
Reconstructable expressive verbs—verbs, that is, that need no complement as they express propositional meaning themselves—include some of the normal interactions of any human conversation: replying (§12.4.1), talking behind someone’s back (§12.4.4), abusing them (§12.4.5) and lying to them (§12.4.6). But telling stories (§12.4.2), calling out a greeting (§12.4.3.1), calling to attract attention (§12.4.3.2) and shouting loudly (§12.5) reflect the essentially oral communication of traditional Oceanic societies.
The data in §12.6 support the possibility that POc report verbs were in some cases also used in the senses ‘think, opine’ and ‘want, intend’.