of culture (and society) and functions as a storehouse of signs of knowl-
edge. Within this frame, certain significant markers of identity stand out
and provide foci for discussion and exposition. A term we have often
highlighted in this regard from Mount Hagen is the Melpa language
wordnoman, meaning mind, consciousness, will, reason, seat of emotions,
ethical sense, individual desire: personhood for the Melpa, and as such it
comes into a plethora of social interactions that define humanity and social
life (see, e.g., Stewart and Strathern 2001 ).
There are also aspects of grammar that are enlightening when seen as
cultural phenomena. We pick out two of these here. Melpa has an enclitic
suffix, signaling agency or cause of an action. Linguists have identified
ergative verbs as ones in which the subject of the verb when it is intransitive
appears in the same form as it does when it is the object of the same verb
when transitive (e.g., compare‘the window broke’with‘the boy broke the
window’). The reasons why such usages have commanded attention have
to do with the dual senses of meanings in the verb along with variations in
the form of the nouns such that the form of a given noun varies when it
appears as the subject of a transitive verb as opposed to an intransitive use of
the same verb. In English, however, subject and object are in any case not
inflected as they are in Latin, and are identified instead through word order.
This is generally true in Melpa also, although the word order is different
from English. In English elementary word order is Subject Verb Object
(SVO), whereas in Melpa it is SOV. But in Melpa, if the speaker wants to
stress the agency of the subject of the sentence, the suffix /-nt/ can be
added to the noun that identifies the subject. However, this same suffixcan
also be added to an instrument wielded by the subject. Both the subject and
the instrument may take the suffix /-nt/ in that case, without causing any
confusion. In other words, Melpa has a usage that stresses both the agency of
an actor in a transitive verb usage and the agency of some instrument the
actor employs, for example, in warfare when an axe is used to strike and kill
and opponent. Persons and things are thus linked as having agency, a feature
that connects with many others in the culture. The affinity with ergative
usages is only passing here, because Melpa usage only picks out a special
transitive usage rather than a regular marker of the transitive form, although
there are verbs that operate in complex other ways, as with the verb‘eat’:
Transitivena röng nond(I eat food) (literally, I food eat)
Intransitive (?)na peng nonom(I have a headache) (literally,
Me head eats, that is, it eats my head, my head hurts).74 BREAKING THE FRAMES