How reconstructable is Proto Trans New Guinea? Problems, progress, prospects
How reconstructable is Proto Trans New Guinea? Problems, progress, prospects
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原始跨新几内亚的可重建程度如何？
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发表时间：
2012
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通讯作者：
A. Pawley
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作者：
A. Pawley
本文探讨了在多大程度上有可能对新几内亚400多种巴布亚语的假定祖先--原跨新几内亚语（pTNG）进行可靠的重建。为了作出这样的评估，我们需要回答一些更具体的问题，包括：（1）是否有确定过渡政府成员的可靠标准？(2)是否可以对每种语言都有一个明确的定义？(3)我们能否确定一个特定的重组词源应该归属于pTNG还是更晚的阶段？也就是说，TNG的高阶子群是否已经很好地建立？(4)可用的同源集合在数量和质量上是否足够，分布是否足够广泛，以达到可靠的pTNG音系、词汇和形态重建？TNG是一个有效的家族，因为有一个很大的语言集合，这些语言共享明确表明共同起源的特征。然而，精确的家庭成员和高阶亚组仍然不确定和词汇残留的共同来源，比较方法可以适用于稀疏。此外，新几内亚是一个有大量双语现象的地区，导致词汇和结构的借用。考虑到这些因素，一些评论家在20世纪70年代和80年代得出结论，pTNG的可靠重建是无法实现的使用自上而下的方法，即通过搜索属于远亲亚群的语言之间的系统协议。与这种观点相反，我认为，使用自上而下的战略是必不可少的，以实现重建pTNG的初步突破。但很明显，要想对家族历史有一个更完整、更细致的了解，就需要将自上而下的重建工作与自下而上的重建工作结合起来。
This paper asks how far it is possible to make reliable reconstructions of Proto Trans New Guinea (pTNG), the putative ancestor of more than 400 Papuan languages of New Guinea. In order to make such an assessment we need to answer a number of more specific questions, including: (1) Are there trustworthy criteria for determining membership in TNG? (2) Can a clear-cut determination be made for every language? (3) Can we determine whether a particular reconstructed etymon should be attributed to pTNG or to a later stage? That is to say, is the high order subgrouping of TNG well established? (4) Are the available cognate sets sufficient in number and quality, and widely enough distributed, to arrive at reliable reconstructions of pTNG phonology, lexicon and morphology? TNG is a valid family in that there is a large set of languages that share features clearly indicating common origin. However, the precise membership and high-order subgrouping of the family remain uncertain and the lexical residues of common origin to which the Comparative Method can be applied are sparse. Furthermore, New Guinea is an area where there has been a great deal of bilingualism, leading to lexical and structural borrowing. Consideration of such factors led several commentators in the 1970s and 80s to conclude that trustworthy reconstructions of pTNG are unattainable using topdown methods, i.e. by searching for systematic agreements between languages belonging to distantly related subgroups. Contrary to this view, I argue that using a top-down strategy has been essential to achieving initial breakthroughs in reconstructing pTNG. But it is clear that gaining a more complete and finergrained understanding of the history of the family will require the integration of top-down with bottom-up reconstructive work.