Ninde: A Grammar Sketch and Topics in Nominal Morphology

Abstract

Ninde: A Grammar Sketch and Topics in Nominal Morphology is a linguistic description of some of the grammatical topics of the Ninde language of Southwest Bay, Malekula, Vanuatu. The data for this project was collected over a two-year period from native speakers both in New Zealand and Vanuatu. In total, 87 files consisting of traditional stories, translated school readers, process explanations and other materials were collected, of which 32 have corresponding audio files. The description gives a brief account of Ninde phonology, nouns and nominal morphology, verbs and verbal morphology and clause structure. Ninde has three main noun classes: common nouns, personal nouns and local nouns. Ninde is a head-initial language with modifiers found postnominally. Ninde possession marking is in the process of undergoing change. Verbs consist of two main classes: transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. Further, intransitive verbs contain the subclass of stative verbs. Morphologically transitive verbs can decrease valence by reduplication. There is a set of bound preverbal subject indexes that agree with the grammatical subject in person and number. In addition to the subject index, there is an additional preverbal marker which encodes the two-way future and non-future tense distinction. There are eight aspectual markers, which encode aspectual meaning such as duration, attenuation and continuation. Like many Malekula languages, Ninde is nominative/accusative with SVO word order. The analysis for this process was carried out under the framework of language typology.