Mekeo is a language spoken in Papua New Guinea and had 19,000 speakers in 2003. It is an Oceanic language of the Papuan Tip Linkage. The two major villages that the language is spoken in are located in the Central Province of Papua New Guinea. These are named Ongofoina and Inauaisa. The language is also broken up into four dialects: East Mekeo (or "Bush Mekeo"); Northwest Mekeo (or "Kovio"); West Mekeo and North Mekeo. The standard dialect is East Mekeo. This main dialect is addressed throughout the article. In addition, there are at least two Mekeo-based pidgins.
Phonology Numerous different analyses of Mekeo phonology have been made. This section follows the description in Jones 1998 as this covers all four main dialects.
Consonants The four dialects of Mekeo have notably different consonant inventories, although all are marked by small inventories of between six and eight consonants. Northwest Mekeo is notable being the only known language with no coronal phonemes, violating what was previously thought to be a linguistic universal:
/ɡ/ is realised as [dzʲ] before /i/, and /ŋ/ as [n] in the environment of /i/ or very rarely as a free variant in other positions. Otherwise coronals only appear in baby talk and loans. /β/ is in free variation with [v] and [b]. /w j/ vary with [o̯ ɛ̯ˤ]. West Mekeo has a similar inventory but with /l b/ in place of /j β/:
[β] is seen as an allophone of /b/. Similarly to Northwest Mekeo, /ɡ ŋ/ become coronals around /i/. /l/ is velarised to varying degrees. East Mekeo has only seven consonants:
/ʔ/ is subject to occasional loss. /f/ may be realised as any of [ɸ β f v]. /k/ may be realised as [tsʲ] or [tʃ] before /i/ although this is not the case for all speakers. /ŋ/ is realised as [n] under the same conditions as other dialects. North Mekeo has even fewer, with just six consonants:
/β/ varies with [f] and [ɸ]. /k/ becomes [tsʲ] or [dʒ] before /i/. /ŋ/ has the same variation.
Intrusive consonants In all dialects, an "intrusive consonant" is inserted between the vowels /i/ and /a/ in sequence.
In Northwest Mekeo, /ia/ → [ija]~[ia] In West Mekeo, /ia/ → [ida] In North Mekeo, /ia/ → [iza~isa~iʒa~iʃa], and likewise /io/ → [izo] etc. In East Mekeo, /ia/ → [isa], /io/ → [iso] and /ua/ → [ufa] While the latter example inserts an existing phoneme in the language (/f/ in East Mekeo), the other examples are all allophonic.
Consonant correspondances The dialects of Mekeo show the following regular correspondences of consonant phonemes:
Vowels All dialects of Mekeo have five vowel phonemes, shown on the table below:
Morphology
Pronouns and person markers In Mekeo, personal pronouns primarily refer to humans; however, the third-person forms can also be used for animals and other objects as well. Mekeo uses a range of different pronouns for different situations. The following table shows all the main personal pronouns for East Mekeo. This includes unmarked, emphatic and reflexive personal pronouns. Note that the emphatic pronouns are not common in East Mekeo as they compete with another more common topicaliser, au-ŋa. For example, the preferred form for the first person singular would be lau- au-ŋa. In the following table, 1, 2 and 3 indicate the person, SG and PL indicate whether the example is singular or plural and I and E stand for inclusive and exclusive.
Examples The following examples demonstrate the use of some of the above personal pronouns in context.
Grammar
Possessive constructions Possession in Mekeo has two morpho-syntactic distinctions: direct or indirect constructions. Direct possession concerns kinship relations and 'part of a whole relations' and these kind of relations are cultural in origin. Indirect possession covers a more general possession of alienable property.
Direct possession Direct possession relies on relational terms that often form closed subsystems such as kinship terms. In Mekeo, the two relation terms involved in each equation are joined by another term that operates like a transitive verb. The third term is the 'relator' and must be marked for agreement with one of the other terms in the equation. The relator follows the subject and/or the object. The relator is marked for the person and number of the second term or the object.
Indirect possession Expressing alienable possession in Mekeo requires the prefix E- and its various realisations (including zero). This morpheme is then optionally preceded by a free or bound pronoun and then the compulsory suffixed by a pronominal suffix which indicates the person and number of the possessor.
The negative is expressed with negators maini, aibaia and laa'i:
The following is an example of an alternation of the cliticisation process:
Another morpheme to express possession is the location pronoun KE- (realised as ke or ʔe). This pronoun expresses location or place:
Negation Mekeo expresses negation in three ways:
through the negative particle aʼi, which negates nominal predicates; through existential negators, which differ between dialects; and through a negative verb prefix, which negates verbal predicates. This three-way functional distinction between different types of negation is typical of Oceanic languages.
Nominal Negation Nominal predicates (which consist of one or more nominals) are negated in two ways — through either the negative particle or proclitic aʼi, or through existential negator particles. The negative particle aʼi is found in all dialects of Mekeo, with ⟨ʼ⟩ pronounced as either a weak glottal stop or slight pause most dialects, or even not at all (/ai/) in East Mekeo. Aʼi negates a nominal predicate as seen in examples 10 and 11:
Aʼi also occurs as a proclitic particle before nominals, as seen in examples 12 and 13. In this case is functions similar to the English prefixes 'non-' or 'un-'.
All four dialects of Mekeo have existential negators: maini in North-West Mekeo, aibaia or aibaida in West Mekeo, aibaia or aibaiza in North Mekeo, and laaʼi in East Mekeo. The existential negators are sentence-final predicates — where a verb would otherwise be — and express denial of the existence, presence or identity of the preceding nominal predicate. Examples 14 to 17 show the existential negator of each dialect. In both West Mekeo and Northern Mekeo, aibaia can be analyzed as a compound of a'i 'not' and baia 'mere'. These two dialects also have an intrusive consonant, so aibaia is often realised as /aibaida/ in West Mekeo and /aibaiza/ in North Mekeo.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
