Maori
Family:
Austronesian (Subfamily: Eastern Malayo-Polynesian)
Country:
New Zealand
Population:
60,260
Source:
Ethnologue/Wals
Features
Type:
Fusion of Selected Inflectional Formatives: Isolating/concatenative
Exponence of Selected Inflectional Formatives: Monoexponential case
Word order:
Order of Subject, Object and Verb: VSO
Article system
Definite Article:
Definite word distinct from demonstrative: te
Indefinite Article:
a) non-specific indefinite article:
he (indefinite word distinct from 'one'
(WALS))
b) specific indefinite article:
tētahi
Order of Demonstrative and Noun :
Mixed
Order of Numeral and Noun:
Noun-Numeral
Order of Article and Noun:
prenominal (Wikipedia)
Word Order Articles:
Wikipedia on Maori article system
“Particle function as determiners of the phrase’s core:
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article with suffix t- for singular/ Ø for plural
o
Te/ngā: definite article; respectively singular/ plural
o
he: indefinte article
o
tētahi/ ētahi also: ngātahi: indefinite, specifiying, any particular/definite thing;
respectively the one/ the other
o
taua/aua: pointing to anteceding referent (anaphoric)
o
a: ´personal article` for proper nouns, pronouns and sometimes toponyms.”
(Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maorische_Sprache, last visit: 12.01.2011)
Grammaticalisation
he:
“The etymology of he is still open. Presumably he evolved from the numeral.
tētahi:
Compared to he one can analyse tētahi morphologically. It consists of the definite article te
and the numeral tahi ‘one’. Chung&Ladusaw (2004: 27f) argue against the hypothesis, that
tētahi is a definite article or a numeral because of its components. That tētahi is in in fact in
the scope of a negated utterance is an argument against the analysis of tētahi as a definite
determiner. Tētahi is also no numeral, because it lacks the distribution of a numeral and the
numeral, whose distribution isn’t constrained in Maori, is not tētahi but kotahi.
Both articles reached Heine’s fifth stadium, as they have predicative uses.“
(translated from Venneri (2009:24-26))
References
Particular sources on specificity
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Bauer, Winifred. 1993. Maori. London: Routledge
Bauer, Winifred. 1997. The reed reference grammar of Maori. Auckland: Reed
Chung, Sandra & Ladusew, William A. 2004. Restriction and Saturation.
Linguistic inquiry monographs 42. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Polinsky, Maria 1992. „Maori he revisited.” In Oceanic Linguistcs 31, 229-250
Venneri, Diana Katarzyna (2009). Artikelsysteme zum Ausdruck von Spezifität am Beispiel von
Maori, Marokkanisch, Usbekisch und Samoanisch. Stuttgart: Magisterarbeit.
Grammar
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Bauer, W. A. (1993). Maori. London: Routledge.
Bauer, W. A. (1997). The Reed reference grammar of Maori. Auckland, New Zealand: Reed.
Biggs, B. (1969). Let's learn Maori: A guide to the study of the Maori language. Wellington,
New Zealand: A.H. & A.W. Reed.
Biggs, B. (1990). Me ako tatou i te reo Maori (trans. C. Barlow). Auckland, New Zealand:
Billy King Holdings Ltd.
Harlow, R. (2001). A Maori reference grammar. Auckland, New Zealand: Longman.
Harlow, R. (2007) Maori: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maunsell, Robert: Grammar of the New Zealand Language. 2. Auflage Auflage. W. C.
Wilson, Auckland 1862 (http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-MauNewZ.html, abgerufen am
8. Mai 2008). (Reference to article system)
McWhorter, John H. The world's simplest grammars are creole grammars. In Linguistic
typology 5 2001,2-3, 125-417.
Tomalin, Marcus. ... to this rule there are many exceptions: Robert Maunsell and the
grammar of Maori. In Historiographia linguistica 33 2006, 3, 303-334.
Miscellaneous
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Gorriea, Colin; Kellnera, Alexandra; Massama, Diane. Determiners in Niuean. In Australian
Journal of Linguistics 30 2010, 3, 349 - 365
Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of whether there are determiners in the Polynesian language
Niuean. In the literature, determiners are viewed as having three main functions: allowing a
nominal phrase to serve as an argument, encoding definiteness and specificity, and providing
referentiality. The left peripheral elements in the Niuean noun phrase are detailed, and it is
argued that case in conjunction with a feature for proper/common serves the first function, that
definiteness and specificity are not encoded in Niuean except in a secondary manner, and that
referentiality is provided by number, which is distributed across several items in the noun
phrase. It is demonstrated that while definiteness and specificity are not contrastive features in
Niuean, a feature encoding focused and new information is central to the Niuean nominal
system. Niuean thus supports a view of determiners that allows them to vary in their semantic
and featural content.
Keywords: Determiners; Definiteness; Specificity; Case; Proper Nouns; Number; New
Information; Focus; Austronesian; Niuean
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http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/definiteness.html
Article about definiteness with reference to Maori and specificity
Online dictionary: Ngata Dictionary: http://www.learningmedia.co.nz/ngata