These data are from a Melanesian language called Tinrin, spoken in part of the islands of New Caledonia, in the southwest Pacific Ocean (Osumi 1995).
Task: (i) Figure out the function of the grammatical marker
nra
shown in each example in (1) through (6) in bold type, and not glossed. (ii) Decide why this marker does not occur in (7), (8) and (9).
Hints:
• Don’t worry about the fact that Tinrin has another morpheme with the form
nra, which occurs in (2), (4), (5), (6) and (9). This has a different meaning altogether: it’s a third person singular pronoun, and has no relevance to your answer.
• Tinrin has a grammatical category ‘dual’, like Kwamera, discussed in this chapter. But this is not relevant to your answer.
• It will help to compare the structure of (1) through (6), which have the
nra
marker in question, with that of (7) through (9), which do not. What syntactic
factor distinguishes these two groups of data?