The Nafsan language, also known as South Efate or Erakor, is a Southern Oceanic language spoken on the island of Efate in central Vanuatu. , there are approximately 6,000 speakers who live in coastal villages from Pango to Eton. The language's grammar has been studied by Nick Thieberger, who has also produced a book of stories and a dictionary of the language.
Nafsan is closely related to Nguna and to Lelepa. Based on shared features with southern Vanuatu languages (including echo–subject marking, and the free and preposed 1st-singular-possessive morphemes), Lynch (2001) suggests it could form part of a southern Vanuatu subgroup that includes New Caledonia instead of the neighboring Efate languages.
Phonology Nafsan has a total of 20 phonemes consisting of 15 consonant and 5 vowel sounds.Thieberger (2006: 45).
+ ConsonantsThieberger (2006: 46). Labial Alveolar Dorsal Labiovelar Nasal Stop Fricative Approximant Trill
+ Vowels Front Back High Mid Low
As seen in the above chart, Nafsan's vowel phoneme inventory is that of a five-vowel system; this is one of the most commonly seen vowel inventories in any given language in the world and also especially evident in many Oceanic languages. There is a distinction between short and long vowels but it is currently in a process of change that makes its status unclear.Thieberger (2006: 54).
Degemination In Nafsan, it is typical that two contiguous identical consonants occurring in an utterance undergo a process of degemination to be realised as a single consonant. In (1), the two contiguous identical consonants /n/ result in the phonetic attachment of demonstrative ne 'this' to the preceding word nawen ne [nawene] 'this sand'.
AD:Addressee deictic DET:Determiner DST:Distant DUR:Durative IR:Irrealis IRR:Irrealis subject NEG:Negative marker PREP:Preposition PS:Perfect subject PSP:Prospective REL:Relativiser RS:Realis subject TR:Transitive marker TS:Transitive suffix DP:Direct possession
Vowel centralisation High vowels in prepositions acting as a prefix often undergo a process of vowel centralisation to reduce the unstressed syllable. In (2), the high vowel /i/ in the preposition ki is reduced to [ə] when preceding the demonstrative nen 'that'.
Numerals The system of numerals in Nafsan is base-5 (quinary). Numbers for two to five are distinct numerals that are then seen repeated in slight variation for the numbers seven to ten. The pattern of the numerals can be seen in the table below.Thieberger (2006: 77).
Cardinal English i-skei one i-nru; nran; nru two i-tol three i-pat four i-lim five i-lates six i-laru seven i-latol eight i-lfot nine ralim iskei ten
Ralim iskei can be used as an example to see the method for displaying number ten and above in South Efate; the numeral for ten ralim is followed by its multiplier, which in this case is iskei for one. The term for and atmat is added after the multiplier with an additional numeral to form a number such as thirty seven:
Morphosyntax
Adnominal possession There are two ways of marking adnominal possession in Nafsan: through the use of a possessive pronoun (indirect possession), or directly on the noun (direct possession). Indirect possession is used for general possession, while direct possession is used for nouns that are closely associated items (e.g., body parts or products, kinship terms, etc.).Thieberger (2006: 127).
Indirect/general possession Indirect possession is morphosyntactically represented through the use of the possessive markers ni (of) or knen (of it), or of the presence of a possessive pronoun such as nakte (my/mine).
When possession is marked by a possessive pronoun, the pronouns follow the possessed NP:
ni possession: the preposition ni only occurs when the possessum is a noun. The NP follows the form of ‘possessed ni possessor’.
knen possession: This form is used as an inanimate referent, and often indicates a previously mentioned participant in the discourse. It is positioned following the referent noun.
Direct possession Direct possession is used for inalienably possessed nouns. This is similar to other languages of Vanuatu that denote inalienable nouns as those that refer to relationships of part-whole association such as kinship terms, body parts or products, and associated parts (such as leaf/stem).Payne, 1997 These nouns take directly suffixed possession markers, however they can also occur without possessive marking when the possessor is encoded by a noun. The directly possessed (DP) suffix only attaches to the class of directly possessed nouns. For sg and 3p forms, an unpredictable vowel (V) may be inserted to aid DP suffixation.
If the directly possessed noun has no possessive suffix, the referent is presumed unknown or disembodied. Lack of possession also occurs when possession is encoded by the possessed noun preceding the possessor. As in the following example, the directly possessed noun rait (mother) is preceded by the noun tesa (child).
Negation Negation in Nafsan occurs in two ways. The first is the use of the intransitive verb tik (no, nothing), which can be used singularly or paired with the generic proclitic i= (3sgRS). The second, more widely used method, is through the use of discontinuous negative particles ta ... mau. Nafsan also does not differentiate between the negation of predicates and the negation of whole propositions.Thieberger (2006: 78)
Tik Tik is a verb translated as 'no' or 'nothing' and is used in similar contexts to its English translations.Thieberger (2006: 74) In the following example, tik is used in the same way as in the English translation.
Tik is also able to be made into a transitive verb through the addition of the transitive suffix -ki. When this occurs, the new gloss is 'to not have'. As such, in the following example there is no instance of a possessive verb being negated, instead the verb in the sentence (tik-ki) is negative in meaning. Another verb that is negative in meaning is tap, meaning 'to not do something'.
Negative particles The other way of negating predicates in Nafsan is through the use of two negative particles: ta(p)...mau. There is free variation between the use of ta and tap, ie the usage does not change according to any specific environment.Thieberger (2004: 250)Ta(p) is used preceding the proposition to be negated, and mau follows at the end of the sentence. The following examples show a positive sentence, which is then negated in the second example.
Sometimes, in the casual speech of young people predominantly, the second negative particle mau is left off, as seen in the following example.
The ta marker can also act a durative marker, so in negative sentences where both uses of ta are present it can result in two different readings of a sentence. In the first example below, reading the first ta as the negative one results in the whole proposition being negated. In the second example, exactly the same sentence, reading the second ta as the negative results in only the final verb (puet 'to take') being negated, thus creating a different meaning entirely.
Demonstratives There are three common forms of demonstratives in Nafsan: go 'that, near addressee', ne 'this', and nen 'that'. Similar to other Southern Oceanic languages, these forms serve both spatio-temporal and discourse deictic functions.Thieberger (2006: 149-153) The form go 'that' is addressee-anchored referent to a spatial location nearer to the addressee from the speaker's perspective or something previously said by the addressee. This encoding is found in other languages of Vanuatu, such as Ske, that do not belong to the Central Vanuatu subgroup. There is an ability for syntactic ambiguity stemming from the two common functions encoded by demonstratives resulting in dual interpretations possible in some utterances. This is shown in example (16) and (17) where the noun kal 'digging stick' used with the demonstrative go can mean 'the digging stick near you' from the spatial sense of the form or 'the digging stick you talked about' from the discourse sense of the form.
In Nafsan, demonstratives have a noun-demonstrative word order which is typical of Austronesian languages according to the World Atlas of Language Structures. They typically appear in two locations within a sentence as shown in examples (18) and (19); as a modifier of the noun phrase and following a directional adverb, respectively. Otherwise, demonstratives must undergo nominalisation through the addition of the prefix te- (see 3.4.1) as they cannot occur as the only exponent of a noun phrase. While demonstratives can co-occur with lexical nouns and focal pronouns, they cannot do so with clitic pronouns in Nafsan.
The form nen 'that' frequently occurs in collocation with the subordinator kin to create the English equivalent 'that which' as seen in example (19). As the form nen 'that' has the potential to act as a demonstrative or a relativiser, the pause given between the two forms nen and kin indicates that it is likely the form nen 'that' is acting as a demonstrative that is modifying the noun phrase in this context.Thieberger (2006: 300)
The demonstratives ne 'this', and nen 'that' also often occur in collocation with the noun mal 'time' to create the forms malne 'this time', as seen in example (20) and malnen 'that time'.
Distant Clitic The distinction between demonstrative forms ne 'this', and nen 'that' is a result of the distance-encoding clitic =n. This clitic can occur with several word classes as shown in the table below. Furthermore, like spatio-temporal demonstratives, it also has the deictic function of acting as a referent to previous parts of a discourse as shown in example (21).Thieberger (2006: 124) +Examples of distant clitic on different word classesWord ClassFormGlossForm + CliticGlossDemonstrativenethisnenthatVerbpato gopanto go therePrepositionrekiforrekinfor that
Presentative Demonstrative The presentative morpheme is a demonstrative in Nafsan which has no paradigmatic relationship with the demonstrators detailed above. The form kia is often collocated with interrogatives such as, such as fei kia 'who here', and typically places emphasis on the preceding nominal or utterance, as shown in example (22).
This function of drawing attention to its preceding forms has been used alongside fillers iwel, gawan, tkanwan which are all used to mean 'thus', 'that's the way', or 'like that', the latter of which is used at the end of the story as seen in example (23).
The emphatic purpose of this demonstrative is similar to those found in other languages of Vanuatu such as the form na- in Ske in example (24).Johnson (2014: 207)
Nominalisation
'Te-' Nominalisation Nominalisation of demonstratives, verbs, possessives, ordinal numbers, quantifiers, and nouns occurs in Nafsan through the attachment of the determiner prefix te-. The productive process of te-nominalisation allows for the derivation of a large class of demonstrative pronouns.Thieberger (2006: 142) +'Te + demonstrative' nominalisationFormGlossTe + FormGlossnethistenethis onenenthattenenthat one (distant)gothat (near addressee)tegothat one (near addressee)
Example (25) reflects how addressee deixis is encoded in the demonstratives that have undergone te-nominalisation.
The prefix ka- is attached to nominals greater than one in Nafsan to form ordinal numbers which can then further gain the prefix te- to form a demonstrative as shown in example (26).Thieberger (2006: 144) +'Te + ordinal number' nominalisation FormGlossTe + FormGlosspeifirsttepeithe first onekarusecondtekaruthe second onekatolthirdtekatolthe third one
Pronoun and person marker There are mainly two classes of pronoun in Nafsan. The free pronoun and the bound pronoun.Thieberger (2006: 103)
Free pronoun