A grammar of the Manihiki language

This thesis describes the grammar of the language spoken on the two small atolls of Manihiki and Rakahanga in the Northern Group of the Cook Islands. The language is a Polynesian language belonging to the Eastern Polynesian subgroup and is closely related to neighbouring languages such as Tongarevan and Rarotongan. The work is the first ever reasonably thorough description of this language, and is based on a number of video recordings, collected during a total of approximately 12 months of fieldwork. The fieldwork was split into several different visits to New Zealand, as well as to Rarotonga and Manihiki in the Cook Islands. The recordings were transcribed and translated with the help of native speakers. The grammar is divided into seven chapters: Preliminaries, Phonology, Word Classes, The Noun Phrase, The Verb Complex, Clause Structure and Complex Sentences. From the description, one can see that the Manihiki language is a fairly typical Eastern Polynesian language. It is grammatically very close to Rarotongan and Tahitian, whereas the phonology is virtually identical to that of New Zealand Māori, with exactly the same phoneme inventory. When it comes to word classes, Manihiki exhibits a fluidity between nouns and verbs which is typical of Polynesian languages, and which is probably facilitated by the fact that Manihiki is an almost entirely analytic language, with no inflectional morphology and only three derivational affixes: two causative prefixes and a nominalizing suffix. Manihiki also appears to be a fairly typical Polynesian language when it comes to the use of determiners with noun phrases and preverbal particles with verb complexes. It also contains the presentative preposition ko, cognate forms of which are found in most other Polynesian languages. Further research will be needed in order to determine the exact position of Manihiki within the Eastern Polynesian subgroup.