11 ADJECTIVES IN NORTH-EAST AMBAE
Catriona Hyslop
- Lolovoli, North-East Ambae, Vanuatu
North-East Ambae is one of two languages spoken on the island of Ambae in
northern Vanuatu. The language covers the northern, eastern, and southern parts
of the island. The languages of Ambae are members of the Northern Vanuatu link-
age, a sub-group of the Oceanic branch of Austronesian. With approximately 5,000
speakers, the language has a relatively large population of speakers compared to
most Vanuatu languages. The dialect described here is that spoken in the Lolovoli
district, in the south-east of the island. Throughout the chapter I shall refer to the
language simply as Ambae.
2 Typological profile
Ambae is a conservative Oceanic language. The language is agglutinative with very
little allomorphy. Typical of languages in this sub-group, it is a nominative-accusa-
tive language, the grammatical functions A and S patterning together in contrast
to O in terms of strict AVO/SV constituent order and indexing in the verb phrase
(VP) of the subject argument by a proclitic, and of the object argument by an en-
clitic. Ambae is predominantly a head-marking language, although relativization
is dependent-marked.
There is a clear distinction between nouns and verbs in Ambae. However, a con-
siderable number of roots are precategorial. That is to say, some roots can occur
underived as the head of a noun phrase (NP) as in (i) or as the head of a VP as in
(2), and it is not possible to state categorically whether they belong essentially to
the class of nouns or verbs. Despite this, for each occurrence of a form its word
class in that context can be determined according to its syntactic function and
morphological marking. If a word occurs as the head of a VP, preceded by a subject
proclitic, then it is a verb. A word functioning as a noun will occur as the head of
an NP, generally preceded by an article, depending on the sub-class of noun.
(i) Mo mena.
REAL ripe
'It is ripe/ripening.'