An investigation of language change and contact effects on verbal categories in languages of New Guinea

‘Verbal categories’ are defined as grammatical categories expressed either by the verb, verbal morphology, or other parts of speech that modify verbs. These may include tense, aspect and mood (TAM), negation, evidentiality, valence and voice, participant reference, sequence marking, serial verb constructions (SVCs), and incorporation. There is minimal literature on the effect of linguistic contact on verbal categories in Papuan languages, despite a significant amount of research showing many cases of contact-induced change throughout the New Guinea area, predominantly in lexicon, nominal grammar, and general syntactic typology. Papuan languages overall tend to be highly verb-prominent, and in many Papuan languages the verb is the part of speech which exhibits the most morphological processes and affixation. The effects of linguistic contact in this category therefore warrant more investigation. This thesis investigates Papuan languages spoken in three regions of the New Guinea area with reported extensive linguistic contact, to look for effects of contact on verbal categories. The selected languages’ expressions of TAM are described in a set of narrowly defined categories, to enable a comparative study of their features. The thesis presents a number of examples of contact-induced linguistic change in verbal categories among the languages of these contact zones, and examines each one through a theoretical framework that draws on the literature on linguistic change, contact, and cognition, grammatical and semantic theory, as well as anthropological and geographic information. This thesis contributes to the fields of linguistic contact theory, and of Papuan linguistics, by looking into an under-researched facet of linguistic contact and change in the New Guinea area. In addition, I expand on the work of Thomason and Kaufman (1988) by presenting a number of examples where social factors either heavily influence linguistic change, or are in some way ignored or bypassed due to cognitive factors.