Maori

Māori is a Polynesian language spoken in New Zealand (NZ).  (It's possible your browser is not showing the second letter of this word correctly if unicode isn't enabled: it's "Maori" with a macron over the "a").

 

I grew up in NZ; my first language is NZ English, not Māori (I'm a Pākeha - a native NZer with European ancestors).  However, Māori culture has a continuing pervasive influence on NZ society.  I became interested in Māori when I took a course on Polynesian diachronic linguistics taught by Ross Clark at the University of Auckland.  It was eye-opening to discover the similarities of many Polynesian languages to Māori - somehow my childhood education had given me the impression it was remarkably different from every other language.  I immediately went out and recorded a native speaker in Auckland's Department of Māori studies.  Since then I've taken the opportunity to record as much speech as I can, with a particular focus on intonation and prosodic phrasing.

 

I don't intend to write a phonology or grammar of Māori.  Instead I've used my research on Māori to inform my theoretical work.  For example, it played a central role in Maximal words and the Māori passive (2003/2004) [pdf], which argued that languages can place maximum length restrictions on words.  This idea was developed significantly by Kate Ketner in her 2007 dissertation ([pdf]).

 

I've also written about Māori word stress, syllable structure, intonation, reduplication, morphological haplology, and prosodic phrasing in the articles listed below.  Again, these discussions are embedded in discussion of broader theoretical issues.  I have a lot of tapes as yet untranscribed and unanalyzed.  My hope is to deal with them as soon as time permits.

 

A methodological note: Māori gave me a deep appreciation for spending a lot of time working on one language.  For example, many people had worked on the Māori passive, but it was only after working on its syllable structure, morphology, and Prosodic Word form that I had the necessary understanding to make sense of the complex passive and gerund allomorphies.  Working on Māori also made me aware of the different aims that dictionary- and grammar-writers have from a theoretician; for example, the author of the major dictionary on Maori - Herbert Williams - liked to revel in the exceptions to the otherwise robust generalizations about the passive's and gerund's allomorphs, so much so that many people have thought that the exceptions were the generalizations.

 

References

de Lacy, Paul (2009). Phonological evidence. In Steve Parker (ed.). Phonological argumentation: Essays on evidence and motivation. Equinox Publications, ch.2.
[abstract] [chapter] [handout]
• Has a short discussion of Māori loanword phonology.

 

de Lacy, Paul (2004). Maximal Words and the Māori passive. In John McCarthy (ed.) Optimality Theory in phonology: A reader. Blackwell, pp. 495-512.  [chapter]

 

de Lacy, Paul (2003). Maximal words and the Māori passive. In Andrea Rakowski and Norvin Richards (ed.) Proceedings of AFLA VIII: The eighth meeting of the Austronesian formal linguistics association. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 44. Cambridge, MA: MIT Linguistics Dept, pp.20-39. 
[abstract] [article] [handout] [talk]
• These two articles are about the famous Māori passive allomorphy, and the gerund.  They discuss Māori syllable structure, foot structure, and PrWd structure

 

de Lacy, Paul (2003). Constraint universality and prosodic phrasing in Māori. In Angela Carpenter, Andries Coetzee, and Paul de Lacy (eds.) Papers in Optimality Theory II. UMOP 26. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications, pp.59-79. ROA 561.
[abstract] [chapter]
• Discusses prosodic phrasing and declarative and focus intonation in Māori.

 

de Lacy, Paul (2001). Predicate nominals in Māori, Minimalist Syntax Archive #179.
[article]
• The only pure syntax paper you'll find on this website.  About predicate nominals like "John is a teacher" and equatives "John is the man" in Māori.  It argues that NP/DP predicates end up in the same place as D-linked wh-words, lending support to Sproat's original analysis of VSO order as involving predicate movement to an A' position.

 

de Lacy, Paul (1999). Circumscriptive morphemes. In Catherine Kitto and Carolyn Smallwood (eds.) Proceedings of AFLA (Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association) VI. Toronto: Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, pp.107-120. Also ROA 339;http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~twpl/volume16.htm.
• Looks at a morphological phenomenon in Māori which involves the lengthening of an initial vowel in trisyllabic words.  I analysize it as a type of morphological haplology: where a phonologically contentless morpheme coincides with part of the word and forces a prosodic boundary in it.
 

de Lacy, Paul (1998). A cooccurence restriction in Maori. Te Reo (Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand) 40: 10-44.
[article]
• Looks at cooccurrence restrictions on labials in Māori.  Contains some now outdated notions of feature underspecification.

 

de Lacy, Paul (1996). Circumscription revisited: an analysis of Maori reduplication, Rutgers Optimality Archive #133.
[abstract] [article]
• Analyzes the seven different reduplication patterns of Māori.