 Dwi'n cael ei fod yn ystod i chi ddweud o'r Longu Gwylodau. Ond mae'n rhaid i ddweud yn cymryd i'r gwaith hwnnw, ond yn ffysg, ynghylch chi'n ffysg ei ffysg hwnnw, i ddweud o le'r Longu Gwylodau'r Langu, dyna'r blaen i'r cynllun o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhwng, o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhwng, os ydych chi'n rhan o'r rhwng, ac mae'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r canelotach o gyfnoddau cysylltio. Felly byddwn ni'n meddwl ar y ddisgymfodol i'r ffordd o'r canelot, cyfu'r canelot i'r sôn, yno'r ffordd o'r canelot. Felly, rydw i'n meddwl am ymlaen i'r gweithio. Wel, rydw i ddim yn fawr, ac mae'n rhywbeth i'n ffordd yma. Rwy'n rwy'n dechrau i'r ysgwrdd am y ddweud i'r ddwy'r ysgwrdd yn ymlaen yn y ffordd ysgrif iawn. Ynogi yw Alice Votaya, a rwy'n rwy'n ffroedd yng Ngagalli Llywodraethol yn Gwadda Canaal, ac rwy'n dechrau yn enghraifft a gyrdd y basket, yr eitaf y basket, oherwydd mae'n ei ddweud. Dwi'n ddweud ymlaen oherwydd mae'n ei ddweud i ddweud oherwydd ymlaen, mae'n ddweud oherwydd mae'n adion o'r ffordd. One of the key things that as an outsider I've been aware of going into the longer community is the fact that women carry things on their heads. But what I'm going to do today is to talk about the domain of carrying in the sense that it's a very culturally salient domain for this community and also address, if you like, some contributions perhaps that looking at domains or action verb domains that include a variety of lexically specific verbs where often there's a close association between the verb and the object and therefore the cultural impact. To sort of ask the question, is there something that domains such as this have to offer the broader sort of lexical semantic sort of issues? So that's sort of what I'm going to do today. Let me start or let me move on then to sort of give a bit of context as to from a linguistic point of view why I think this area is interesting. I mean culturally I think it's interesting because it's something that's easy to observe and something that over time as I've come to understand it I realise is quite significant to the community. In other words the basket itself is significant and in fact the fact that women carry things on their head is in a way emblematic of their communities. So in other words they identify themselves as a group where women carry things on their heads whereas around them other communities don't do that. So it's kind of got that kind of identity issues as well. But from a lexical semantics perspective one of the sort of context for this is that there has been quite a lot of work on action verb domains cross linguistically most notably and sort of influential if you like is work on cutting and breaking but there's also been work on the demands of eating and drinking and carrying and I'll say just a little bit about those but within that work which was if you like done from an extension point of view and sort of basically through the Max Planck Institute of Linguistics it struck me that the languages that they seem to find most interesting were the ones where they could see what the comparisons and similarities were. Where they came across languages which had these if you like large groups of verbs that were very lexically specific and related to the culture it seemed like they were the kind that we kind of have to ignore because they don't seem to say as much for us about cross linguistic issues. So let me sort of see if there is something to say I guess. On the other hand it's also been acknowledged by anybody who's worked in that area that these lexically specific verbs do reflect material culture and cultural practices. So work by Penny Brown for example, work by Heathan McPherson on Dogon, work by Steve Levinson and so on. So that's very clear that there is this relationship when you have lexically specific verbs that there is this relationship between material culture and cultural practices. But as I said what I think at least as far as I'm aware is somewhat missing is to see whether or not these domains in fact have some kind of coherence or pattern themselves. In other words it's not just a random group of words that each one you need to know in terms of the culture but is there something more going on. Obviously I'm going to suggest there is at least for the work, the domain that I've looked at in Longu. A little bit about the language but not too much. I've put on your handout, so you have a handout which is not the same as the PowerPoint. On the handout we'll start with just some language notes but I've also included a list of the verbs of caring and then a couple of texts and references which are partly for your reference and if you want to ask me questions but I won't go through in great detail. So you can look at a few more language notes on your handout but for our purposes it's really mostly just to understand where the language is spoken which is on Guaida canal in the Solomon Islands. It's an oceanic, Austronesian language. There are currently around 3,000 speakers. When I first went there two decades ago there were about 1,500 speakers so the number of speakers has increased but as with many parts of Melanesia the number of speakers, the increase in the number of speakers doesn't necessarily mean that the language has become stronger, more that the language of wider communication, in this case Solomon's pigeon, is kind of part of their life. But Longu is definitely spoken every day in the villages. It's definitely transmitted to children and schooling is in English but there is a move, in fact there is a national languages policy from the Solomon Islands government that says that vernacular languages will begin to be used but they haven't yet implemented that policy but still they definitely have that as a goal. In terms of its location, I don't know if I can point, but these are the many islands of the Solomon's and Longu is spoken here on the main island of Guaida canal and the capital is Honiara. Nevertheless it's relatively remote because there are no roads so in fact there's not quite the loss of language that there might be for the language that's right next door to it. Again you can ask me about that later but just to give you some context. I also want to say that there is a paper that I've written that's under review at the moment so it's not published but it covers more things that I'm going to cover in the talk. One of the things that's in the paper that's not in the talk is a more deep discussion of lexical semantics of the verbs. However I'm quite happy to make the paper available to anyone who's interested in that or if you have follow-up questions. So I will talk a little bit about the lexical semantics and feel free to ask me more about it but what I'll concentrate on is two particular aspects of this sort of broad topic. Firstly to give you the reasons why I believe this semantic domain is culturally salient and therefore worthy of study if you like. But also to suggest that there is an organising principle of the domain. I'm not sure that organising principle is the best term but what I want to convey is that it's not a random group of verbs that just are about the culture. There is some sort of coherence that's understood in terms of the cultural prominence of a particular verb and that verb is the verb to carry on the head. And it's carry on the head as I've said is done just by women and also the close relationship between carrying on the head and this particular basket called a para basket. So I'm going to say something about that although I should emphasise that it's not just that kind of basket that they carry on their head. It's just that that's a very important one. So I'll talk a little bit about the verbs of carrying. As far as I can see there are about 12 verbs of carrying in the language. It's not a formal grammatical class. In other words they differ according to things like transitivity, the way they behave in terms of directional particles which are common in oceanic languages, the way they behave in terms of rejuplication and also in the use of prepositional phrases following them. So there are definitely grammatical differences so it's not that that tells us that it's a formal grammatical class but it's a semantic domain that we can recognise and I'll say a bit more about that as well. Also there's no generic verb carry. So this is one of the things in a lot of the work on action verb domains, the question of is there a generic verb and then sort of if you like verbs that sort of taxonomic relationship or is it different. There's certainly not a verb to carry in longu but there is a more general verb andeia which you could which can be glossed as take but it's not, it doesn't have a sense of diaxis without the directional particles. I'll leave that for you to ask me about later because I've got some literature on that as well. So it's a kind of non diotic take if you like that certainly can be used when there's not a specific say material object or a specific reason to indicate what way something's carried. And I've discussed that in the paper but I won't discuss that now. Here's the list of longu verbs of carrying and what you'll see is that I've just glossed them. These are by no means definitions, just glosses. But what I do want to say about this list is that in fact it was Andy Paulie who first said something to me when I gave a talk about this a couple of years ago that this is quite a common thing in Austronesian languages to have say perhaps between 10 and 20 verbs of verbs of carrying is quite common across Austronesian languages in a language that he was working on why and Fiji and there were 20. So longu is definitely not at the upper limit however interestingly or relevantly they didn't have a verb to carry on their head and he made the point initially I mean he was quite clear about this and it's obvious to all of us I think that therefore just because there are a lot of verbs still you need a culture to decide what kind of verbs are we going to use. So the why and Fiji and people didn't have a reason if you like to carry things on their head, the longer people do. We have a verb in one language but not the other. To follow up on this point about Austronesian languages I put a sort of a request out in about a month ago or less asking people if they had information about verbs, a verb in their language that meant carry on their head. And I got responses about that as well as people giving me lists of words and just to give you an idea of how widespread the idea of a set of verbs related to carrying is in Austronesian. I had people responding from, I won't give all the name of the languages but just the areas, the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu where they said they had between 10 and 20 verbs of carrying. So it's quite a sort of common thing in this language family. And there's also the proto-Austronesian does have a verb that's been reconstructed to carry on the head. So it also seems, and this is Pauli's point to that this is something that's been important in Austronesian culture sort of from the beginning. So definitely worth following up on. To say a little bit about the glosses, and this if you like, I just wanted to say this so you don't think I'm just sticking with the glosses and saying that's enough. In the paper I developed that in much greater detail but just for today I've left it at that. But I wanted to give you some idea of where I went with the lexical semantics of the verbs and where I began if you like. And so I did start with tell me's view of what a transport verb was and he includes carry in English as a transport verb. And so he describes transport verbs as those that share qualities that express an agent's using a body part to move or position an object. You'll see from the list that I've given you that all of those verbs involve a body part. They say nothing and I'm not going to say anything today about whether it's motion or position that's involved and yet that's a very important question. It's not something that one should assume but I'm not talking about that today. And notice too that he talks about an agent and for my purposes agent is too general and it's too if you like reminiscent or important in terms of grammar. But for the semantics I think we need to talk about the carrier as opposed to just the agent. And that becomes important because I'm going to argue that for some verbs the lexical semantics entails the gender of the carrier. So it's not just somebody carries it but a woman carries or a man carries just for some of the verbs. That might be something people argue about or would like to argue with me but that's what I'm going to suggest based on the data I have. But nevertheless as it says there in the overhead on the PowerPoint these glosses are still very relevant because they give us a starting point of the shared characteristics that we're looking at for a particular domain. And as I said we can see that in the glosses each of the verbs says something about a body part. Some of them or we can divide the list up into two if you like and see that some verbs select for human objects. So there are many verbs that refer to ways of carrying children and the others refer to ways of carrying. I think probably it's better to say non-humans rather than inanamates because they can carry pigs on shoulders and you could carry a cat and a dog and so on. But anyway so there is that selection and there are specific words for ways of carrying children. And a couple but only a couple say something about the manner in which something is carried. So for example some verbs refer or relate to ways of something hanging. Now of course these are very general terms they're never going to do in terms of lexical semantics but they're a start and that's so we're just at that starting point. What I'd like to now go through is the reasons that I aside from the obvious Austronesian data in terms of this domain of carrying being significant in a wide number of languages in Austronesian languages and historically as well. From a longer perspective why I think it's a very salient domain. I said first of all that there's no verb to carry but there is a verb zambe meaning to not carry. And I consider that to be quite important because it's sort of saying we assume people will be carrying things. And indeed as I said there's no there are no roads in that area. There are no bicycles, wheel burrows, no kind of other means other than people. So it's not surprising that people have to sort of take part and participate by on their body moving things or with children holding things. In some of Felix O'Maker's work he's talked about salience or one of the characteristics or ways of saying something salient is to do with the number of lexical items and the frequency of use and that's very clear in Longoo. I do understand that the term salience is used differently by different sorts of groups so I'm just trying to give you a definition that I think works for what I'm doing. It's not saying that other definitions don't work for other things. There's also ample evidence in terms of narrative texts to show that the longer people are paying attention to the way people carry things. And so for example on your handout, perhaps we can start with number three on your handout where there's a text there. I don't have to go through it but you can see perhaps just look at the English gloss where it's a story about two boys observing a girl who in fact is not a girl but a spirit. But trying to work out is she from our village, is she one of us or not? And one of the ways in which they identify her as being just not of their community, they don't know that she's a spirit, is by the fact that she doesn't know how to carry this particular basket on her head. So I think this kind of text evidence is very useful in supporting the fact that you see people doing it all the time. But if someone's not doing it, both they've got this word saying not carry but also it's kind of like they can't be part of us. And in that text they use the verb zambe, not carrying anything, as well as you can see in the first line the verb sumia to carry on the head. So that would be the key way that women should carry things, that also indicates that. Other ways in which narrative texts highlight the importance of carrying or knowing the right way to carry the right thing comes in text four. This is kind of an interesting text for me because I was given it, or at least the woman whose name was Lula gave it to me a long time ago when I first went there. And I didn't pay that much attention to it really except it was a nice, I did in grammatically but not in terms of what it was saying because in fact it was about contact. It was about contact between Europeans and the Longview people and so it wasn't a sort of traditional story, you know. But in that story, I liked the story a lot, it was quite a funny story and it focused on the fact that this boy, who was considered a lazy boy, went to work on the plantation and was paid in all of these different ways with a sixpence and butter and a cat. And the humour came from the fact that he never knew how to carry them home, so he'd lose them. He'd melt the butter, he'd drown the cat, he'd, you know, all of these things. And this little section you've got now is because they told him to carry, I think, the bag of rice on his shoulder, which he hadn't done, he'd dragged that and lost the rice, the next day they gave him a horse and he said, OK, I must carry the horse on my shoulder, which of course, tremendous strength, which was kind of the punchline because then he was in great favour, he was so strong, right? But anyway, so this idea of humour being based on whether or not people understand the appropriate way to carry the appropriate thing is also a kind of evidence of the fact that they're attending to this, the longer people are attending to whether and how people are carrying things. And the last, that text, you know, was in my kind of vintage text for me in a sense, but a more recent text came descriptive text based on documentation work I've done in the last couple of years about weaving. And one of the things I asked some people to do after we'd had a dictionary sort of workshop and several days of that, and then we had a morning where people wove things, wove items, and then some of them I recorded them describing the item that they'd woven. And if you look at number five on your handout, you'll see that the man, Titus Sikwa, of Nangali village, he starts describing the basket that he's just woven and it's a much longer text than this, but part of what he says is not just it's made of coconut leaf or this is how I did it, but then he says towards the end, the para-basket is an important basket for us. It's something that we put things into, it's woven so that women can carry it on their head. In other words, there's this really like, here's a basket, it's not just do what you want with it, it's woven so that women can carry it on their head and it's an important cultural artefact. So I'm going to say more about that important cultural nature of it as we go, but I just wanted to sort of point out that unbidden as it were, people are highlighting the fact that how people carry things is important and also that this relationship between material object and carrying is also important. And again, that's not news, but it's relevant to my discussion. Okay, in addition to this linguistic evidence, there's also non-linguistic evidence. From an outsider's perspective, that's me, you can look at photographs, many photographs that either I've taken or were taken in the 1930s by Ian Hoban, who was an anthropologist who worked there for a short time, but he worked in many places in the Pacific. He took wonderful photos and there are many, many photographs of people carrying things and women carrying things on their head, but boys or men carrying other things on their shoulder and it's always a specific, not always, but specific objects are certainly carried in specific ways in addition to other things that like firewood and so on that are carried in the male or female way. There's also video evidence from the documentation project. Again, going back to that photograph I put up at the beginning, that was also videoed, not necessarily that photo, but because she wove things a couple of times and at the end of the process within the video, that's exactly what she does, brings it up and puts it on her head and sort of to show that it's ready. So I think there's quite a bit of outsider perspective, non-linguistic evidence to say it's very important, especially this link between carrying on the head and this particular kind of basket, but from the insider's perspective it's also there. I am involved in an interdisciplinary project with a colleague in Canberra which focuses on Ian Hoban's photographic collection in Sydney University. In 2012, two longer people came to view those photographs and both so that they could take the photographs or have access to the photographs and they were given them digitally and hard copy so that we could think about how to use them, but also to help the archives and the university to catalogue them because they weren't completely catalogued. From this area, Hoban had taken about 450 photographs. The two people that came, one Florence Wattepora and the other a chief Stuart Bongana, at one point, one of the photographs that was put up was of women carrying firewood on their back. Florence said that's not longu, that's not how we carry, that can't be of the longer area. Of course that was a bit of a light bulb moment for me, things started to sort of come into place and saying, oh wow, she's really, it's actually very, very important. So they were able to dismiss maybe 50 photographs as being of an area beyond longu in the bush area that he had taken and it's not the only, that wasn't the only thing they could identify by the way as being not of their area, but I thought that fact that the women are not carrying things in the way we carry things, it's not a photograph of us, even though it was taken in 1933, which is very confident about that. So I think that insider perspective as well as outsider's perspective is quite a sort of valuable contribution to the linguistic evidence that we have about the salience of their domain and the importance of the cultural importance. So I have to apologise to the woman in this photo because these things make you look rather wide, she's not so wide, but I also wanted to sort of, I'm going to say something about the ritual elements of the bride price event and this basket, but this photograph illustrates that this is the pair of basket again and you can see that what she's carrying on her head, but also what is she carrying, just vegetables and things from the garden. So it's something that's used in everyday life as well as in the ritual events in terms of the bride price event. So I do think that this way of carrying and especially this basket is a marker of identity for longu women and as it happens it's not the only area in the world where ways of carrying are considered a sort of emblematic or sort of markers of identity distinguishing one group for another. So Stuart McGill and Robert, Roger, sorry, let me change my glasses, Roger Blench in 2012 noted a similar situation in Nigeria for the Western kindgy women, if I've got that right, they carry things on their shoulders as an important marker of ethnicity. So in that particular area women carrying things on their shoulder was considered that sets you apart from other women. In the Guarakanal area the carrying on the head is what sets the longu people apart from some of their geographical neighbours. So it's obviously not unique but worth noting I think. So far I've gone through the salience of the semantic domain and you can see that I've talked quite a lot about the culture and I think that now I'd like to sort of move on to this idea that within the domain there is an organising principle and as I say maybe it's not the best phrase but I'm not quite sure what other phrase to use just at the moment. And this organising principle certainly results from the fact that one particular verb is the most culturally prominent verb within this domain and I've given you sort of explanations to some extent about it. The idea of a domain that has an asymmetrical pattern, in other words the idea that some verbs are more prominent than others and that we need to pay attention to them in order to understand the whole domain and when it comes to looking at the specifics of lexical semantics there's also more that it has an impact in that area as well which as I said I won't go into now but this idea of there being an asymmetrical pattern is one that's also been identified before in the area of kinship terminology by John Haverland. He, again in one of the language documentation journals 2006 he described the sortial kinship terminology as being asymmetrical rather than sort of being a better reflection of the culture than looking at diagrams where every kind of person and relationship is somehow equal and in other words it's just a kind of, what's the word, generational or other kinds of other kinds of sort of relationships. He sort of talked about the fact that when you have a prominent kinship term then really the way in which you describe that he described it as an asymmetrical model and that that reflects much better what's going on in the culture and that's exactly what I think is going on here. I've talked primarily about the role of women and by the way this is a matrilineal society it's maybe, you know, again that feeds into what, to the discussion. But there is also, one of the verbs is the first verb on the list of verbs of caring, ang o iniw, to carry on the shoulder is a verb that is associated with men. Women don't carry things on their shoulders. So one thing we can also say in terms of asymmetry is that we kind of have a pair here that sort of refer to ways in which men and women carry things. In both cases they relate to something being supported. So they're both verbs of support as opposed to hanging. So again we sort of see that, this asymmetry we start to see an internal, a kind of internal patterns that where we've got pairs or groups of verbs that behave in some way in relation complement one another or a sort of a lexical set within the larger lexical set. I won't say too much more about that now. So I've touched on some of these things before but one point in particular I need to sort of emphasise. So what we have in the way of linking the idea of material culture, cultural practices and modes of caring is the fact that we have a particular basket that's made for women to carry on their head. We have the verb sungya to carry on their head which I argue entails in its meaning that a woman is the carrier but despite the fact that it's often associated that pera baskets must be carried on their head the object is not entailed in its meaning it's kind of the other way round. To define a noun I think, to define a noun pera you have to refer to the verb sungya but to define the verb sungya you don't have to include the term pera that is if you like encyclopedic information but you do have to refer to the fact that it's a woman carrying it. Now of course another piece of information that shows these connections is that there is a heterosimus relationship between the verb sungya and the noun sungyi. In other words there's a concept, there's a formal, they look the same except one's a verb and one's a noun and there's a conceptual relationship between the two and that is that sungyi which refers to bride price feast at that event the pera basket is used to transfer the shell money and the cash or the custom money from the groom's family to the bride's family so here as I said there is a ritual function or ritual sort of element to the importance of the pera basket and it has to be carried on the head and it is related to this bride price exchange so all of a sudden you can see this picture of the sort of centrality on the head, the basket, the women and so on. But I also don't want to say that there's no role for men in this, both this event or this culture by any means and that also unguinya carry on the shoulders it both entails in its meaning the fact that a man is the one who's carrying something and by the way it could be one man or two like poles between two shoulders or carrying something singly and also that's an important part of the event as well and I'll show you a couple of pictures that show that. So here is this was not a really big bride price feast but it just happened to occur at the time we were doing the dictionary workshop so I was able to go and so in the picture on your on the left, on this side you can see that men are counting out the shell money so that's those long strings of things of custom money they're working out how many do we have to give this time because there was an earlier part of the bride price exchange where some would have been given so that's the men are doing that at the same time the women are doing other things related to the putting things into the basket and creating these sort of garlands and so on for the bride and groom to wear on the head but you'll see in the in the picture on the right side there again in the photo is the para basket so that's the basket that's been used once the money's been counted and once the cash has been given it's handed over in this particular basket so there's this ritual element as well on the same day you can see that so the same event you can see that men are carrying the pig on their shoulders so again that's a common way to do that but that's important too even if you could do it some other way if you came into the event and women were carrying it or you were carrying it in some other way with your hands for example that wouldn't do it has to be done in this way so clearly there's and this has been mentioned before in terms of other in other languages for action verbs clearly there is an association between the kinds of objects that are carried and how they're carried there's a kind of real world association between what makes sense to carry in certain ways but I want you to notice both a photograph and then hopefully I do have it on the yep on your handout so in the photograph on this side you can see that both men and women are carrying the same things it's a kind of roughly hewn basket a different kind that's just got things like yams or sweet potatoes in it but these are also presented as part of the bride price feast or for the bride price feast but you see that women have them on their head or on their shoulders so it's not just about the objects it is actually about the gender and if you look at your handout in number 6 there's a short text on the bottom of page 3 where men and women are carrying the same things the same objects they're carrying coconuts that have been tied together but the men the men angwy they carry it on their shoulder and the women sui on their heads so just this kind of evidence that it's not just about there's definitely an association between the carrying and the material objects but that's not the key thing the key thing is the gender so if you like summarizing in a sense some of the things I've just said there has been quite a bit of work especially in cutting and breaking for cutting and breaking verbs where this association between verbs has been identified Penny Browns noted that for some cutting and breaking verbs the verb is only applicable to one kind of object that's not the case in Longu I'd say there's a close association but it's not the case that there's just one verb one object so that's just that point but one point or one sort of thing I think that some of this work this research can sort of help us take further that was a summary paper at the end of the volume on cutting and breaking verbs is the question what is the role of material culture in a language community in the lexicalisation of a domain I think it's a very worthwhile question and one that we should sort of pay attention to as I said I think for the Longu people in terms of defining the nouns or the objects the nouns that refer to the objects we do need to include something about the action of the way in which they're used but it doesn't work in the other way in other words the verbs are not primary semantically the verbs are not primary that's what I would say about this domain at least so another thing that I did and you can see this in the paper I can just give you a couple of points another thing that I did was to ask people well when it comes to particular verbs verbs of carrying in your mind are there particular objects associated with them and so in the far left side the object referred the object that they identified were given so the para was the first one the para basket for carrying on the head but there were also other kinds of feasting bowls called a lali and also the woven pad sukai that's used to sort of support a heavy something above it so these were the primary things and they're clearly culturally specific that were associated with carrying on the head and only women would do that but it doesn't mean that there aren't also other things for men carrying things on the shoulders the things that they said were most likely to be carried in that way were sticks meaning the poles for the pigs heavy bags so obviously there's a physical aspect of these things that are heavy and also baskets and bowls that can't be hung over your shoulder I won't go through them all but just to say that there's a verb kaveria which is used for various kinds of baskets that have strings so they can be carried over the shoulder and in that sense they're culturally specific because they're locally made items but it doesn't mean that they don't use the same verb for if for example someone in town got a European sort of bag that could be hung over their shoulder same verb so it's not making that kind of distinction but it is worth noting that both men and women can carry things hung from their shoulder but only men carry things supported from their shoulder and as I said there are many or number of verbs that refer to ways of carrying children and women carry children in all of those ways so there's no sort of prescribed male or female way of carrying a baby or a child and there's also photographic evidence to support that Okay I just thought I'd give you a couple of nice pictures here just to sort of show you the one kind of basket called a keropub basket which is primarily for fishing and so you can see that it's made in a canonical shape it can be used as they're fishing to put the catch in but it's also something that can be hung up outside the house and it's also got a small strap that can be used on a shoulder as well so this link between the way things are made and how they're carried is an obvious one as well summarising really here so I do think that we can argue within this domain of verbs of carrying that in addition to those glosses that I gave you earlier and the sort of more tell me and sort of approach to say somebody carries something on their head or whatever that there is also for some verbs but not others a semantic selection based on the gender of the carrier in these verbs in terms of the this is important in terms of dictionary work so making sure that a definition reflects that that's certainly one point but I think also that perhaps we're a little bit loath to admit these kind of examples in linguistics that the gender it's quite easy to talk about differentiation in terms of objects but often the subject or the agent could be anybody but culturally not really culturally that's not actually a reflection of what's going on and therefore because not culturally I think not semantically so to conclude and as I said I've got more data on the lexical semantics and ways in which I've unpacked the glosses but just to sort of conclude on these key points about the salience and then the sort of organisational sort of principle within the domain in studies generally on action verbs we see that most interest focuses I think of course with repercussions that are more interesting but most interest focuses on whether or not a domain is sort of hierarchical where there's a generic verb and sort of other verbs under that or non hierarchical in some sense the lexically specific verbs with no generic verb but what's kind of missing is really an understanding or a sort of deeper work into what these non hierarchical groups of verbs might pattern in what ways they might pattern so clearly for the longu and the domain of carrying we've got evidence that it's not a ergonomic pattern but there is a pattern there and it's based on the cultural prominence of a particular verb but also the complementary nature if you like of the verb that relates to the way men carry and women carry so this kind of I think is something that should be sort of attended to when we look at these lexically specific domains moreover this pattern does reflect a matrilineal society where the routines of women's lives are kind of at the focus especially in terms of the bride price event and that has repercussions into the sort of daily event there certainly we can also say that this that some of the things that we can identify in terms of the the way people live their lives is also evident in parts of the grammar in different kinds of ways just this idea of routines as being very important to people and being sort of embedded in the lexical semantics and so on we see it also in the grammar in terms of things like it's a language that has object incorporation so the sort of dig sweet potatoes carve canoos all of this kind of object incorporation type constructions are very evident there and there are other kinds of grammatical constructions that sort of indicate that that the routines of people's lives are somehow embedded in what we see so that's also a little bit I've written a little bit about that in the paper as well so in summary I think there is a lot more both in longu and in other languages to explore in terms of the kinds of patterns that do exist in action verb domains especially when we see these lexically specific verbs that don't have a generic verb and see well what is going on there may be a range of models that we discover in terms of these domains but I do think that an asymmetrical model where the sort of prominence the cultural prominence of one or two verbs is one which is quite evident here and we might find that other languages work in a similar way and in particular in Austronesian languages if it's as it's the case that there are so many that do have these fairly large number of verbs in the domain of caring but that work is yet to be done but anyway thank you can I better put my acknowledgements so I think it's very important to thank especially the women of longu people who've helped me and who work there and that I've sort of learnt a lot from but share their understanding of the culture and the language with me and also to the hands rousing Endangered Language project as it was funding from that project that supported this research so thank you okay thank you very much for fascinating talk kept it quite short and sweet I think we can go on and listen to a lot more but we've got plenty of time for questions so that's good before I forget as Deborah mentioned at the beginning of your talk she's very kindly offered to make the pay for available to anyone who wants to know more so if you want to get hold of that or if anyone didn't get a handout as well I know you didn't have enough then you can email me it's rw44 so ask it's on the seminar website I can also send you the PowerPoint because they kind of go together I mean they're not the same but they kind of go together so yeah all that will be available but yeah let's have some questions I'll just go ahead and answer what people yes thank you so much it was so interesting and so fascinating to listen to thank you so much I just have a small question is there any evidence from the basket from the caring, the man of caring kind of demonstrated the matrilineal type of society but I wonder if there was any evidence to actually show that perhaps it's underlining the strength of men over women because physiologically I happen to know I can't give you a reference but I did read it somewhere that it's actually the light side to carry on the head and on the shoulder so did you have any sort of idea to show that men are stronger that they don't have the thought to carry on the head okay so I think that's actually a good point but the first thing I just want to clarify I didn't intend to suggest that this kind of shows a matrilineal society what I was saying is that it is a matrilineal society and the fact that certain things are for example made just for women and there are things that women do and it's kind of prized in a way in other words it's not a men's basket that is considered to be emblematic of the culture it could be because there are baskets also for men so I just think it's kind of interesting that there is that I suppose respect that I think fits with that idea but nevertheless as you saw the men counting money men are definitely in charge in the sort of everyday way I think I mean land is transferred through the women's line but you know it's not to say that men don't have a more significant and political role and so on and I completely agree with you about the carrying in terms of weight that men will carry heavier things I can't believe how heavy some of the things women carry are but nevertheless it's obviously the men who carry the really heavy things as I said sometimes you can't believe that women are carrying what they're carrying but no I think there is that gender that physical difference however one and this is a completely off the cuff remark and it really should be taken as totally anecdotal one thing I think is not interesting one thing I've also observed there because sometimes people have asked I've been asked questions like so how tall are people and how do you feel blah blah blah well yeah and I sort of think there's not I think between men and women there aren't as big the differences between the average man and the average woman in terms of height is not as great as in Caucasian groups so I mean that's just a sort of a point about whether how strong you are is the biggest thing because women are quite strong as well but I definitely think men are carrying the heaviest things yeah but I don't think it's about putting women down that's what I'm saying it's not about putting women down it's not putting women down at all but it's certainly not because it's not it's only in some way showing or having some kind of respect but it's not also they're not kind of like right above it's a it's a family it's a family a bride price event there are other ways in which one could interpret it in a negative way from a western culture but one shouldn't so it's not about men or women being better but no no stronger or better or anything like that no no no in the picture it showed comparing that men and women had the same thing on their shoulder I think I spotted a little boy there carrying it on his head so is it a gender and also an age thing? well it's probably a girl but it could short in the blue tisha you see can't guarantee yeah okay so it does look like a boy and it could be a boy on the whole there on the whole because you know like even though you've got if you like rules but on the whole you do see girls from a very young age carrying things on their head and on the whole you do see boys from a very young age carrying things on their shoulders so it's even from like two or three you know they would be trained to do that it would be an expected thing I can't speak for a particular instance as it were but they're definitely trained to do that so if a person from that population saw this picture they would say it's definitely a girl they would assume it was and I have to say clothes are hard to come by sometimes so if they had the boys shorts that are more boy like that wouldn't matter really yeah but I'm not saying it is a girl I just don't know do they have the same sense of gender as you think there's just men there's other cultures that have multiple yeah let's say fairly much yes similar very yes now I know in certain cultures it's kind of different and I have been some people have said to me well what happens in this situation or that situation but I think this is the expected situation that men do certain things and women do certain things and the view of men and women is very much I think it's also a Christianised country now so I mean you know quite Christianised all of the Pacific is so I can only speak for you know what's happening now except to say that clearly from the 1933 photos exactly the same kind of situations the gendered view is very similar I mean if there are some nuances that I don't understand that may well be the case as a linguist even though I've worked there for quite a long time but it's not something I think is really would be strong in any case yeah so I was wondering if you managed to actually try and elicit a taxonomic relationship between different verbs that carry cancer or you tried it I let's say I've got let's say I discussed it rather than tried to elicit it so when I had the text examples which I had over time quite a lot then I if you like interrogated people about well what exactly is going on here so and as I said earlier that there is this take verb that and in a similar way to English he just took my he just took my glasses case or something in a sense he's somebody's carrying it taking it it's not take it doesn't have to be take away in other words so there's been quite a lot of discussion about them and there isn't really I think because of this the links between the material objects and the ways of carrying it's pretty clear it's not taxonomic I should also add that Cliff Goddard in who works I don't know if you're familiar with the natural semantic metalanguage sort of field of semantic analysis argues that in a sense that taxonomic description doesn't fit any of these verbs anyway he would argue that or people in certain semantic theories would argue that so I think there's that element that their verbs that are associated with particular nouns or objects but no it's been interrogated but did I elicit it I don't know if that would be the right word yeah thank you yeah so wondering when you're talking about gender as well that women carry on their head and men on their shoulder what about making the actual baskets in certain ways is that also important to the world and that's so there is a in terms of if you like making things there are some gender divides but that particular basket the peribasket men and women make it and in fact the one in number five that is a man Titus sickle that was a man who made it the woman that I showed you at the front Alice her she's one of maybe five and her brothers make those baskets as well I think it was her mother taught all of them and they make it but she's kind of become the one that does most of it no the men definitely can make it carving is primarily male so we also did in this interdisciplinary thing project there was sort of some carving workshops and various things and while they say men carve only men carve it was clear that some women were helping a little bit at the edges but they're not the primary carvers and there's a kind there are kind of mats that only that men don't make that women make on the whole I think that there it's not it's not totally prescribed even the mats and the carving but there's a strong preference for women to be just doing the mats which are seen as kind of easier and things for the home and so on and carving which is more substantial and so on but these baskets no can do that too those are questions you know with the birds of care that you presented I wonder with some new items that come in I have no idea how they live exactly do they have phones, do they have mobile phones do they have books and what about carrying those that are more modern that's a very good question firstly they do now have mobile phones but it's it's an area that has no electricity or toilets or anything like that but mobile phones have become quite big in the pacific books yes for school or bibles or for the church services and so on but there is I can go to the list I just didn't want to like it's no point saying everything this third verb that's to carry something hanging from the head like a string basket that you might sort of hang that way and that's a new item and it's a borrowed verb so there is sort of loss and gain if you like of language in this area when you have new items and new words so that's a borrowed verb and they traditionally didn't make those kind of string bags but they brought them from sort of other areas and there's another verb the lula carry something on your back that's a bit more like carrying the can be sort of backpack type things but also like carrying wood sort of down below the lower part of your back that isn't very that's very infrequent I don't have many examples of it and they say they don't use it that much so there is definitely a bit of flux in this and then as I said if there were other new things carry something in the hand that could be hold in the hand but lots of things can be carried in the hand and I think your point is right when there are new things but new things can be carried on the head and new things can be carried on the shoulder and new things can be carried like hanging from the shoulder but there is this addition that mobile phones carry in the hand most likely they would have it in a small basket so they chew beetle nut so you've got all these little baskets that have the beetle nut line and so on so they often have small baskets for that and then they might have similar things slightly different shape for mobile phones or other things they could put in their pockets short pockets if it was a man they could carry it in their hand but it's likely that they would have a basket and put it in the basket and they would use one of both yes that's right and the other thing you could say is often they're carrying more than one thing so also especially you've got your child you've got this, you've got something hanging from the back of your head so in that grammatically or in terms of claw structure we are kind of just coordinated clauses which identify carrying a certain thing in a certain way and then carrying this in a certain way and so on oh do they use those words metaphorically at all? oh good question they I can't think of what the phrase is they have words they have phrases that are if you like metaphoric that refer to those kinds of things and I haven't come across them in relation to verbs of carrying so except they do, but the word shoulder the actual body part shoulder could be yeah would be used metaphorically but not the verbs of carrying so body parts might be and heads and bellies are used a lot to just talk about things like confusion or upset or again that's quite common but it's not the verbs of carrying so that's the point I will keep looking for that one do they play rugby? no no no I thought they would have to have a a special benefit no there's a bit of football, soccer there's a bit of that but that's all no groups no no I was wondering if you were looking at the video evidence about is there a cognitively ingrained in that way? one thing that came through well I don't think this quite answers your question but your question gives me an opportunity to say this which I think is worthwhile aside from the you know at the end putting it on the head one thing that I only realised by doing the videoing is that the whole body is involved in weaving in weaving a basket so I'm sorry I didn't include one of the photos but I have a photo where part of the so the baskets are made from coconut leaves and they're stripped from the main thing but the time when the person weaving would hold one end of it with their toes so there's basically their feet are involved then there's also a stage where say for a string to make a kind of string they would roll it on their thigh they say that some of the if you look at the basket if you look at the basket the colouring in the basket that's just coconut leaf and that's green and the other part the black part has been blackened with a sort of liquid from a certain nut and so there's also smoke so the smell both of the leaf and the smoke is involved and I can't remember all of the other things they took but once I said something about the feet they said yes we think every part of your body is involved in weaving these things and the sound of the rustling of the coconut leaves and so on so I think there's definitely more there than I've kind of looked at and I kind of see that as part of the gesture thing but I don't have anything actually concrete to contribute beyond that okay Do you have any sort of compliment first to picking up heavy or light objects and the negative words Yes, a couple one in particular so the carry something in two hands Suluwa that assumes that you're picking up a heavy object the toya carry something in the hand would assume that it's a small object and lots of examples to show that it's sort of hand size so there's that sort of thing but they're inherently also to pick up as well at the same time to carry something oh okay on the whole no the bottom one picks something up and that can be used because it's I think also it is to do with children but it's the picking to pick up but what is interesting is the verb suungi so I said that these verbs don't behave in the same way in terms of things like rejuplication and so on so if you rejuplicate suungi means to take something off your head and put it on the ground to take off so I have talked about I had talked to someone about that stage of location and so on but it doesn't seem to be but that's an interesting one that rejuplication is putting it down also in terms of rejuplication the rejuplicated form of carry someone in a cloth on your side tv tv tv refers to the cloth so there's you know they're not so another point is motion I mean it's not quite your question but I have looked carefully at where motion is sits is it in the verb is it in the construction, is it in the what and motion seems to be part of the syntactic constructions that they fit in so all of these I think all of these verbs can quite easily just be position and you then get the motion in the next clause so the most typical way of using I think most of the verbs but the verbs that I've checked to have one clause which says something like maybe I don't have one here but it's simply just to say carry verb somebody carry verb something or just carry verb and or coordinator they go and he goes so and verb of motion or fly so I think there's also evidence to say when you're going back to Talmy's kind of motion or location that needs to be very carefully argued for in any of these domains is it motion or location is it motion and location is it one or the other and the other thing is I don't think they all work the same for sure in that way