Vamale language

It was spoken in the Pamale valley and its tributaries Vawe and Usa until the colonial war of 1917, when its speakers were displaced.

Longer words are morphologically complex and put stress on the penultimate stress-bearing unit, which is often a syllable of the root, but not always.

While some morphological factors complicate the picture, regular phonological aspects predict most stress positions.

Speech act participant indexes (the proclitics, not the suffixes) are also extrametrical: Other syllables attract stress.

Semantically bleached function words like /a.ˈman/ 'thing; object place-holder' are re-analyzed as one foot in compounds: The complex word ape-caihnan-aman-le, 'NMLZ-know-thing-3PL.POSS' 'their knowledge', is pronounced [ˌa.pe.tɕaj.n̥ãn.ã.ˈmãn.le], which could be explained by analyzing (ape-)caihnan-aman '(fact.of-)know-thing' as a compound, -le 'their' as a suffix, and thus the main stress on the penultimate syllable.

For Hmwaveke, stress is described as being fundamentally penultimate,[2] and forms which deviate from this, with few exceptions, are analyzed by Campbell as several phonological words.

Aspect in Kanak languages is expressed with morphemes which often combine aspectual, modal, and temporal meanings.

Overall, Vamale aspect closely resembles its counterparts in its northern sisters Nêlêmwa, Caac, and Bwatoo.

The differences between them, however, may shed some light on the development of aspectual systems in the region, and provide evidence for a distinction between old and new forms.

[4] Vamale, on the border between the two, is split-transitive and tripartite in its verb-indexing, nominative-accusative in its subject marking on noun phrases, and has ergative patterns in nominalized verbs.

This is a split-transitive system, and is further complicated by the fact that objects are indexed as suffixes, much like stative subjects, but do not use identical forms.

le=saxhuti3PL=narratei=[hun-thakeART.SG=NMLZ-throwhanupictureka=yo]SUBJ=1SGle=saxhuti i=[hun-thake hanu ka=yo]3PL=narrate ART.SG=NMLZ-throw picture SUBJ=1SG‘They tell the story of my playing cards.’Free pronouns are marked as subjects with a proclitic ka.

If the possessor is anaphoric information (“their chief”), or the relationship a generic one (“mosquito repellent”), this is indexed on the linker via possessive morphology (instead of using the whole noun phrase), not with free pronouns.