The field of language documentation continues to grow, but an historic split between sign language documentation and spoken language documentation persists. In order to fully understand the linguistic context within a community, it can be necessary to overcome this split by designing language documentation projects to address threatened and…

We collaborated to investigate humor in the existing corpus of Kere (ISO639-3: sst). This collaboration was a useful test of the Kere corpus and led to the rediscovery of unarchived video recordings, which contained important contextual information. These videos had been deprioritized in the original deposit, but they contained important…

This is a grammar which provides a detailed linguistic description of the phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse, lexicon and cultural environment of the Mehek language and its speakers. Mehek is a language spoken in Papua New Guinea by approximately 6300 people. It belongs to the Sepik language family, Tama branch. The theoretical background…

While tonal systems have typically been classified as "pitch accent" or "true tonal", there is growing evidence that systems instead have a variety of features which vary across languages, rather than falling into discrete categories. These category labels have been used widely in literature about the languages of New Guinea,…

Migrant speakers of endangered languages living in urban centers in developed countries represent a valuable resource through which these languages may be conveniently documented. Here, we first present a general methodology by which linguists can compile a meaningful set of visual (and sometimes audio) stimuli with which to carry out a reasonably…

Investigating a tone language involves careful transcription of tone on words and phrases. This is challenging when the phonological categories--the tones or melodies--have not been identified. Effects such as coarticulation, sandhi, and phrase-level prosody appear as obstacles to early elicitation and classification of tone. This article presents…

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Kove, an Austronesian language spoken in the West New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea. Kove is primarily spoken in 18 villages, including some on the small islands north of New Britain. There are about 9,000 people living in the area, but many are not fluent speakers of Kove. The dissertation…

In the early 1990s, the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) enacted educational reform. It officially abandoned its English-only policy at elementary school level, in favour of community languages. In response, the Kairak community of East New Britain Province developed a vernacular literacy programme. This paper, based on original fieldwork…

Indigenous languages are used for instruction in elementary schools in Papua New Guinea, but teachers have generally received their own education in English. The challenges of identifying terminology to use in mathematics include many-to-one correspondences between English and the vernacular languages, and different grammatical structures.…

Time, an everyday yet fundamentally abstract domain, is conceptualized in terms of space throughout the world's cultures. Linguists and psychologists have presented evidence of a widespread pattern in which deictic time--past, present, and future--is construed along the front/back axis, a construal that is "linear" and…

This paper describes a case study of language development in rural Papua New Guinea, in which parents felt the local school was not meeting the educational needs of their children. In this case study, the local, national and global narratives concerning use of the vernacular in education were apparent in the negotiation leading to an apparent…

Suggests Papua New Guinea offers a practical example of how a small, multilingual country with limited resources has developed a package of strategies for dealing with the challenges of multilingualism and using its multiplicity of languages in education as a tool for improving teaching and learning, saving resources, and moving towards education…

Discusses grammaticalization of "laik" in Tok Pisin, meaning "want/like/desire" (from English "like") and "klostu," meaning "near" (from English "close to") as markers of proximative. Shows although "klostu" was more generally a feature of Pacific Pidgin English and began to…

This volume contains an index to volumes 18-38 (1974-1994) of the "Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics" (Stephen A. Marlett and J. Albert Bickford) as well as the following 1995 papers: "Laryngeal Licensing and Syllable Well-formedness in Quiengolani Zapotec" (Cherly A. Black); "A Grammar Sketch of the Kaki…

Kaki Ae is a non-Austronesian language spoken by about 300 people on the south coast of Papua New Guinea, at best distantly related to any other language in that area. A brief grammar sketch of the language is presented, including discussion of the phonology, sentences, phrases, words, and morpheme categories. Kaki Ae phonemics include 11…