Discourse practices as an areal feature in the New Guinea region? Explorations in Paluai, an Austronesian language of the Admiralties Dineke Schokkin * James Cook University, Cairns, Australia Received 7 August 2012; received in revised form 23 September 2013; accepted 26 September 2013 Available online 13 November 2013 Abstract This article explores discourse practices in Paluai (Admiralties, Oceanic, Austronesian), spoken on Baluan Island (Manus Province, Papua New Guinea), comparing similarities and differences with discourse practices in Papuan languages (see e.g. de Vries, 1995, 2005, 2006). Many Papuan languages exhibit discourse practices which cross genetic boundaries: ‘distributive’, ‘thematizing’ and ‘recapulative’ strategies, which may lead to a high frequency of certain expression types and ultimately to grammaticalization. These practices have been described for several genetically unrelated Papuan languages, and they can be regarded as an areal feature of the region. Although these strategies are not unique to Papuan languages, their frequency distinguishes this region from others. Thematization is a strategy used in particular at the beginning of a narrative. Like in many Papuan languages, certain Paluai demonstratives are used as markers of topicality and/or definiteness. Distributive strategies with only one modifier per head are preferred, and thus verbs typically have one full nominal argument and nouns one modifier. Recapitulative strategies, predominantly tail--head linkage, are very common too. This raises the question whether the features encountered in Paluai are also frequent in other non-Papuan languages across New Guinea. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Ethnopragmatics; Demonstratives; Areal diffusion; Papua New Guinea; Oceanic languages 1. Introduction This article explores several discourse strategies for an Austronesian language of the New Guinea area. Paluai, belonging to the Oceanic subfamily (Eastern Admiralties subgroup), is spoken on Baluan Island in the Manus Province of Papua New Guinea. Despite its different linguistic affiliation, discourse practices in Paluai are reminiscent of those that de Vries (1995, 2005, 2006) discusses for a variety of Papuan languages. Many Papuan languages exhibit specific discourse practices which cross genetic boundaries: ‘distributive’, ‘thematizing’ and ‘recapulative’ strategies of language use, which may lead to a high frequency of certain expression types and ultimately to freezing of frequent forms into language-specific grammatical patterns. One or more of these phenomena have been described for a range of Papuan languages which come from various families across the region and are thus often genetically unrelated. In his 2006 paper de Vries discusses a number of examples of this from his own work and the work of other linguists. The main examples from his own research (alone or with others) are Wambon and Inanwatan from the Bird’s Head Peninsula and Korowai from the Merauke district (both in West Papua). He also refers to data on Urim (see Hemmilä, 1989) and Yimas (see Foley, 1986) from the East Sepik Province and Usan (see Reesink, 1987, 1994) from the Madang Province www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 62 (2014) 107--120 * Correspondence to: The Cairns Institute/SASS, James Cook University, PO Box 6811, Cairns, QLD 4870, Australia. Tel.: +31 6 19 016 304. E-mail address: dineke.schokkin@my.jcu.edu.au. 0378-2166/$ -- see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.021