Book review: Muehlhaeusler, Dutton & Romaine (2003)

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from LINGUIST List 15.1342 Wed Apr 28 2004

Tok Pisin Texts


EDITORS: Muehlhaeusler, Peter; Dutton, Thomas E.; Romaine, Suzanne
TITLE: Tok Pisin Texts, From the beginning to the present
SERIES: Varieties of English around the world (T9)
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-3502.html


Miriam Meyerhoff, University of Edinburgh.


''Tok Pisin Texts'' (TPT) is a collaborations between three scholars who
have long-standing connections with linguistics in Papua New Guinea.
Collectively they have a comprehensive record of publications on the
language now known as Tok Pisin. Tok Pisin is the English-lexified lingua
franca spoken in all parts of Papua New Guinea, but especially in the
areas corresponding to the former German New Guinea (p.2). TPT provides a
brief overview of the social and linguistic development of Tok Pisin and
then moves on to provide many examples of Tok Pisin texts that the editors
have collected, starting with a text written in 1844 and culminating with
short stories, cartoons and personal notes and letters written in the late
1980s.

The volume begins with a short chapter ''Sociohistorical and grammatical
aspects of Tok Pisin'' (Muehlhaeusler). This chapter first outlines the
social context in which Tok Pisin has developed and observes that despite
the tendency to differentiate between the Tok Pisin spoken on the coast,
in the Highlands and in the Bismarck archipelago ''[l]exical differences
within Papua New Guinea are due less to geographical than to social
factors'' (p.3), consequently M. suggests that the more ''important
subdivision of Tok Pisin is into the four main sociolects ... bush pidgin
... traditional rural Tok Pisin ... the urban version ... and lastly 'Tok
Masta' ('language of the white colonizers')'' (p.4).  Reference and
language learning resources are summarised (p.2). The history of Papua New
Guinea since colonisation is reviewed briefly, concluding with a picture
of Tok Pisin that has the language sitting in a sociolinguistically
interesting space -- both expanding in some communities, and retreating in
others in the face of competition with English and local vernaculars
(p.8).

The chapter then turns to a structural sketch of Tok Pisin, with sections
on phonology (covering well-known features such as epenthetic vowels and
the loss of English interdental and palato-alevolar fricatives). The next
section discusses inflectional morphology and notes the polyfunctional
nature of some forms, e.g., the occurrence of the suffix '-pela' with more
than just adjectives. The section on syntax looks at the pronoun system
which, like the other English- lexified pidgins/creoles in Melanesia
(Solomons Pijin and Bislama in Vanuatu), indexes semantic features
occurring in the substrate languages (viz. inclusive/exclusive distinction
in first person; dual and trial forms). The inventory and use of
interrogative and reflexive pronouns is discussed next, and the structure
of the noun phrase is very briefly noted.

The verb phrase describes the structure of common declarative sentences,
and their expansion with the negator 'no' and time, manner, place
adverbials. Tense and aspect marking are not covered at all; instead the
reader is referred to earlier work by M. This section finishes with a
discussion of co-ordination and a range of subordinate clause
constructions (including conditionals, quotative constructions and
experiencer verbs).

The structural description as a whole concludes with a section on the
lexicon (an area that M. has done a good deal of work on in the past (see
for instance Wurm & Muehlhaeusler 1985). This is the most substantial of
the sections in the grammatical component of the chapter and covers four
issues that are often considered to be prototypical of pidgins, including
the simplification of the lexicon compared to the lexifier, impoverished
(or non- existent) ''word formation component'' and reduplicated forms
(p.25).

The chapter concludes with a few comments on how the texts that follow
were gathered and how they might be used. M. reports that the texts were
chosen so as to ''cover the full range of variation found in Tok Pisin,
both along its historical and its social and stylistic axes'' (p.33).
However, the reader is cautioned against using these texts alone as the
basis for quantitative research.

The rest of the book is made up of 100 texts, some quite short and some
running to more than four pages. A short contextual note usually
introduces each item and the text that follows is given an interlinear
gloss (the earliest texts do not have interlinear glosses because they
follow English-like spelling norms and anglicised grammar), and a free
prose translation of the text into English. Most texts also have some
commentary about aspects of the Tok Pisin that are linguistically
noteworthy, e.g. internal variability that is characteristic or unusual
for the period, early attestations of a form, socially significant (or
regionally telling) lexical choices. Reference is made to ''standard
spelling conventions'' (p.161) but these are not spelled out in TPT.

The texts are grouped into nine parts. The first part is 15 texts from
1840s through to c.1921 (''From early contacts and 'Gut Taim bilong
Siaman'''). Part 2 is 6 texts from 1920-1945 (''Indigenous voices''). Part
3 (''The use of Tok Pisin by missions and government'') has 7 texts, and
Part 4 is two texts from the 1950s-60s. Part 5 (''Traditional indigenous
voice 1970 to the present'') has 21 texts of a mixed nature: several are
narratives about traditional practices or old war stories, some are
interviews, and some are snippets from people goofing around. A number
provide quite explicit information on the metalinguistic awareness of
speakers and beliefs about the origin and spread of Tok Pisin.

Part 6 (''Translations of foreign voices'') has 12 texts that are
translations from English, German or Japanese (everything from the Bible
and the highway code through to a propaganda leaflet). Parts 7 and 8
include texts more or less directly influenced by contact with qEnglish.
Seven oral texts in ''Urban Tok Pisin and the influence of English'' and
23 written texts in ''New written genres'' are intended to give readers of
TPT a sense of the extensive linguistic consequences of extended contact
between Tok Pisin and English in urban areas. Finally, part 10
(''Creolized varieties of Tok Pisin'') provides 6 narratives and one
conversation between a linguist (Romaine) and two girls about what
languages they know.

EVALUATION

A very nice aspect of TPT is the wide range of genres covered and the
social information that the editors have included in their commentaries,
e.g. conventions for pronoun use when these are flouted in a text, how
surprise noises are made by interviewees, the denotation and use of
kinship terms. The focus on social variation is also welcome, though
readers specifically interested in variation in Tok Pisin would find
Smith's recent book (2002) a valuable one to read alongside TPT. Although
M. claims geographic distinctions are less important than social ones,
Smith shows that in a very large corpus of Tok Pisin, quite marked
regional variation emerges, e.g. in the use of many tense, aspect and mood
particles ('bai' irrealis, 'bin' past, 'pinis' completed action, and 'wok
long' continuous). Smith also provides more references to important work
that has been undertaken on the structural development of Tok Pisin, e.g.
by Sankoff (1986) and Mosel (1980, a very important work on substrate
influences on Tok Pisin which fails to make it into the TPT list of
references). The use of commentaries to focus on specific aspects of each
text was also generally helpful and in some cases serve to advance the
field, such as when the editors draw attention to a feature that has
struck them impressionistically and recommend it for further study.

One question that might have been addressed directly in the commentaries
is the how and when the editors decided to represent fast speech effects
or on-going grammaticalisation and change in the spoken texts. For the
texts to be maximally useful to linguists, it would be useful to know what
criteria determined whether a word would be represented orthographically
in a reduced form. 'Mitupela' ('we, dual') on p.192 is given a footnote
saying it was actually pronounced 'mitala' (p.194, see similarly fn.2
p.124). To give another example, readers do not know how it was determined
to represent the prepositions 'bilong' and 'long' as 'blo' and 'lo'. It
appears that the proportion of 'blo' users is higher in the later texts
but this might be for several reasons: (i) it might reflect across the
board changes in the language; (ii) it might be because the researcher who
gathered those particular texts was more interested and attentive to such
reduced forms; or (iii) it might be an age-graded tendency highlighted in
these texts because the speakers are younger. This is a good example of
why the editors caution against taking the texts as a statistically
representative sample of the language and it is to be hoped that users of
TPT will bear this in mind. Again, Smith's (2002) recent descriptive
grammar provides considerable evidence about the phonological reduction
characteristic of adolescents' L1 Tok Pisin and would be a helpful
complementary resource to TPT.

In one case, the footnoting raises more questions than it may answer. On
p.272 we find the phrase ''Em lai karim'' ('he wants to carry') with the
note that 'lai' is ''a reduced form of 'laik'''. The reader might very
reasonably ask how one could know if 'laik' has been reduced here since it
is in a neutralising environment. Cross-referencing between texts might
have been helpful in clarifying how widespread this phenomenon is, or more
explicit referencing to Romaine's (1999) work on reduction of verbal
auxiliaries.

The production of the book is generally very good and the graphics are
clearly reproduced. There are some unfortunate typos. Some capitalised
'I's appear where they should be lower case 'i' (the predicate marker),
p.10 -- this is the long arm of Word's Autocorrect function, which is a
pain to anyone working with Melanesian creoles. There are several
occasions where the first person pronoun 'mi' is rendered as 'me' (p.19,
24, 250) and 'Rzga' appears as 'Raga' (p.270), 'tzsol' as 'tasol' (p.223).
The gloss for 'aiting', 'perhaps', is missing its single quotes (p.37).
There appears to be a total scrambling between example and discussion on
p.23 where the base sentence ''mi laik yu givim mani mi'' ('I want you
give money me' [sic.], MM's gloss) becomes ''Mi laik yu mas givim mi long
mani'', glossed as 'I want you to give me money' (but looks more like
'must give me to the money'). I don't speak Tok Pisin but this seems to be
a real snafu.

On its own, TPT needs to be used by researchers with some sensitivity. For
this reason I would not recommend TPT as a source text for students in,
e.g., a pidgins and creoles course and certainly not as a first port of
call. However, used in conjunction with Wurm & Muehlhaeusler 1985, Romaine
1992 and Smith 2002, TPT provides a sound basis for researchers interested
in exploring the structure and use of one of the world's best known
expanded pidgins/creoles.

REFERENCES

Mosel, Ulrike 1980. Tolai and Tok Pisin: The influence of the
substratum on the development of New Guinea Pidgin. Canberra: Pacific
Linguistics.

Romaine, Suzanne. 1992. Language, education and development: Urban and
rural Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Romaine, Suzanne 1999. The grammaticalization of the proximative in
Tok Pisin. Language, 75. 322-346.

Sankoff, Gillian 1986. The social Life of Language. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

Smith, Geoffrey P. 2002. Growing up with Tok Pisin: Contact,
creolization and change in Papua New Guinea's national language.
Westminster: Battlebridge Publications.

Wurm, Stephen A. and Peter Muehlhaeusler 1985. Handbook of Tok Pisin.
Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Miriam Meyerhoff is Reader in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at
the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests are in the areas
of variation and change in Pacific creoles (especially Bislama) and
the study of language and gender.