A grammar of Woleaian

Abstract

Woleaian [ISO 639-3 woe], endonymically Kapetale Faliuwesh (lit. 'language of our [is]land') or Kapetale Wolea (lit. `language of Woleai'), is a nuclear Chuukic (Micronesian-Austronesian) language mainly spoken on the six atolls of Woleai (Wolea), Eauripik (Yaurepig), Ifaluk (Ifaliug), Faraulap (Fatialap), Elato and Lamotrek (Lamocheg), located in Yap state of the Federated States of Micronesia. The current speaker community is estimates to be between 3,000 and 4,000 speakers, with at least a quarter of those now residing outside of these atolls. This dissertation gives a grammatical description of Woleaian naturalistic speech, mainly focused on the Eauripik variety. The data used for the linguistic analysis comes from a community-based and -oriented language documentation project with over 35 hours of naturalistic speech data. As such, all analysis is essentially data-driven, being led by the corpus rather than pre-conceived linguistic categorizations. Since naturalistic speech is the focal point of data analysis, it also means that elicitation was not used as an analytical tool outside of the phonetics and phonology. Instead, elicitation served to support analysis of grammatical structures from the naturalistic speech corpus in a few rare instances. Because of this methodological approach, it is necessarily non-exhaustive, and leaves many open ends for further research avenues. However, I hope that this dissertation forms the start of an accurate linguistic analysis of how the Woleaian language is spoken by its community. \\ The dissertation covers phonetics and phonology (Chapter 2), the word classes (Chapter 3), nouns and noun phrases (Chapter 4), verbs, verbal morphology and the verb phrase (Chapter 5), minor word classes and particles (Chapter 6), simple clauses (Chapter 7), complex clauses and clause combining (Chapter 8), and finally focus, argument structure and discourse organization (Chapter 9).