East Uvean A condensed grammar

Abstract

East Uvean (EUV), also called Faka’Uvea or le wallisien, is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian family, spoken on Wallis Island (‘Uvea) in the French collectivity of Wallis and Futuna, as well as by populations in New Caledonia and metropolitan France. It is a verb-initial language, with basic transitive clauses alternating between VPA and VAP basic word order. Though generally low in inflectional affixation and tending to be analytic, East Uvean features pronominal and possessive systems of considerable morphological complexity with singular, dual, and plural number, clusivity contrasts throughout the first person, and (typical of a Polynesian language) two genitives contrasting in alienability and agentivity. EUV is morphologically ergative in basic clauses, but first- and second-person pronouns have pre-verbal pro-clitic forms in a nominative/accusative alignment. Within clausal nominalizations, the genitive contrast can be used to yield a split-S alignment of arguments. This work is a condensed grammar of the language, with focus on theory-neutral description of morphosyntax.