The Role of Animacy in Teiwa and Abui (Papuan)

0. Introduction In this paper we discuss the role of animacy in the grammar of Teiwa and Abui, two Trans New Guinea languages spoken on two small islands just north of Timor in Eastern Indonesia. Teiwa has approximately 6,000 speakers on Pantar island, and Abui has approximately 16,000 speakers on Alor island. The paper is based on primary data collected on site in 2003-2005 (cf. Klamer, in prep.; Kratochvil, in prep.). While it is common to find pronominal affixes on verbs in Papuan languages, Teiwa and Abui represent the small minority of Papuan languages that only affix transitive objects (P), not subjects (A) (Foley 1986:102-104, Foley 2000:377). The alignment system of Teiwa is nominative-accusative, while Abui has an agentive alignment system. In both languages, A is expressed as an independent NP in preverbal position. Ps always occur in between A and V, either as a lexical NP or as a verbal prefix, or as both. In this paper, we focus on the prefixation of P and show how it is influenced by the animacy value of the referent of P. Animate entities are a salient conceptual category. In first language acquisition, the animacy of entities plays an important role: animate entities are the first to be noticed by young infants, the first objects to be individualized, and nouns referring to animate entities make up the majority of the first lexical items that children acquire (cf. Gentner 1982, Gentner and Boroditsky 2001). Apart from playing a role in the acquisition of words, animacy also determines aspects of the grammatical system of languages. In the verbal domain, it may determine pronominal agreement or cross-reference patterns, as in those languages where animate objects are marked on the verb, while inanimate objects are not so marked. This results in grammatical systems that are grammatically ‘asymmetrical’ (Ortmann 1998), also referred to as ‘differential object marking’ (Bossong 1991, Aissen 2003). Examples of languages with asymmetrical systems