Pijin: A Grammar of Solomon Islands Pidgin

Abstract

Solomon Islands Pidgin (Pijin), spoken by at least 420,000 people, is a variety of Melanesian Pidgin that has not been studied in depth by more than a handful of scholars. This grammar introduces the historical development of Pijin, reviews the current sociolinguistic scene (in particular some hard to access sociolinguistic research), examines some relevant statistics, and briefly touches on the phonology of Pijin. With this background in mind, I set out the grammar of Pijin beginning with the word classes and associated morphological processes. The following Pijin word classes are described: nouns (including noun formation), determinatives, quantifiers (including numerals and ordinal numeral formation), adjectives (including the debate concerning whether Pijin has adjectives or not), pronouns, various nominal modifiers, prepositions (including adverbs that function as prepositions), verbs and their morphology (including the transitive suffix and reduplication), adverbs and various preverbal markers, interrogative pro-forms, relative clause markers, complementisers, coordinators and subordinators, connective adverbs and interjections. The description then turns to the noun phrase and its constituents. Of note here is that I posit a Nominal that is a constituent intermediate between the noun and the noun phrase. Other phrases such as the verb phrase (including serial verb constructions), adjective phrase, and prepositional phrase are then described, as is word and phrase coordination. The account then progresses to the phrase type that I label the Predicate. The Predicate functions as the head of a sentence. In itself it may be headed by any of the phrase types so far described. It is composed of a subject referencing pronoun, a variety of pre-head markers and adverbs, the head itself and various post head adverbs and prepositional phrases. Together with a noun phrase subject, the Predicate forms a simple sentence. Simple sentences of various types are then described. Those sentences that contain more than one predicate are treated as complex sentences. The account of the grammar of Pijin concludes with these and a brief look at some discourse particles that are used to link sentences. Finally, several appendices provide some historical documents, various tables of lexical items relevant to the description, some examples of narratives, and a lexicon.