Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Reference Grammar of Kove

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

Kove is an endangered Austronesian language spoken in the West New Britain province of Papua New Guinea. About 8,000 people live in the area, but many are not fluent speakers of Kove. Community members are rapidly losing language competence and switching to the use of Tok Pisin and English as lingua francas for communication. This change has several causes: modernization in general (e.g., use of lingua franca mass media); the fact that more Kove now go to school, where English is the language of instruction; and increasing social interaction with non-Kove speakers (e.g., due to the mobility brought by modern transportation). Knowledge of the Kove language and traditional culture is no longer being transmitted orally from one generation to the next. The goal of this dissertation project is to produce a reference grammar and a small dictionary, based on elicitation and texts in a corpus collected during fieldtrips. The corpus will include narratives, public events, and conversations recorded in both audio and video formats. Texts will be transcribed and annotated with IPA transcriptions, interlinear glosses, and translations into both Tok Pisin and English. Since very little documentation of Kove and related languages currently exists, the grammar and accompanying vocabulary will be of value not only to linguistics, but also fields such as anthropology, history, theology, and musicology, among others. The grammar and vocabulary will also serve as the basis for the Kove community's educational materials and will help promote literacy efforts.