William Foley: Direct versus Inverse in the Lower Sepik Family

Direct versus inverse inflectional systems are a commonplace feature of languages which signal their grammatical relations primarily by verbal agreement, such as many Amerindian languages or Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas.  Direct versus inverse systems are characterized by one inflectional pattern when a speech act participant (first or second person) functions as actor to a non-speech act participant (third person) as patient and another inflectional pattern when the opposite situation holds.  Scenarios in which the speech act participants (first and second person) act on each other pose particular problems (Heath 1991, 1998).  The Algonkian languages of North America are the paradigm case of this grammatical inflectional pattern.  As the Lower Sepik languages are morphologically complex languages which express grammatical information predominantly through verbal morphology, they, not unexpectedly, exhibit direct-inverse inflectional systems, and such a system was unquestionably a feature of Proto-Lower Sepik.   However, while all six currently extant languages have such systems, each is different to a greater or lesser extent from the others, particularly in dealing with the pragmatically complex scenario in which the speech act participants (first and second person) act on each other.  This paper will look at the direct-inverse systems languages from two first order subgroups of the family with a view to understanding both diachronic developments within the family and enriching the typological understanding of direct-inverse systems more generally.

References

Heath, J.  1991.  Pragmatic disguise in pronominal-affix paradigms.  In Plank, F., ed, Paradigms: The Economy of Inflection, 75-89.  Berlin:  Mouton de Guyter.

Heath, J.  1998.  Pragmatic skewing in 1 ↔ 2 pronominal combinations in Native American languages. International Journal of American Linguistics 64.83-104.