are for referents that occur five or fewer times. That any occur is counter to memorial activation and episodes, but fully supports the account of Goal Oriented Activation.
1.4 Summary
In this chapter I have given a general overview of the book. I am building on the discourse perspec- tive of reference, rather than a sentence grammar approach. Within the tradition of a discourse per-
spective I am pursuing a cognitive approach, relying on insights of psycholinguistics to help understand the reasons behind the choices of referential form. I propose the Goal Oriented Activation
approach, which claims that the choice of referential form is not only based on what has occurred in the preceding discourse, but also by what is to come in the following discourse. The cursory results
given in this chapter are consistent with this model.
6 Introduction
2 The Olo Language
2.1 Introduction
This chapter presents some aspects of the phonology and grammar of the Olo language, including the sound system, practical orthography, some aspects of the morphosyntax, and the semantics of Olo.
This information is intended to lay the foundation for understanding the use of nouns and pronouns in Olo. The material presented is not intended to be a reference grammar, but should still be of interest to
investigators of New Guinea languages. Olo is member of the Torrecelli Phylum and the structures of the language are distinct from both Austronesian and Highland Papuan languages.
2.2 Phonology
Except where otherwise noted the data in this study are given in the practical orthography devel- oped for Olo. The orthography is a compromise between the phonemic contrasts in the language and
the Tok Pisin orthography. Three sounds that are distinguished in Olo do not have that distinction pre- served by an orthographic symbol.
The Olo language has seven vowels: i, I, ¯, a, u, U, o. The phoneme ¯ has an allophone [æ] which only occurs before velars and is symbolized in the orthography as e. A chart of the vowels is given in ta-
ble 2.1. Table 2.1. Olo vowel chart
Front Central
Back high
i u
tense high
I U
lax mid
¯ o
low a
While the sound system has seven vowels, the orthography only uses five vowels; I and U are normally symbolized as “i” and “u”, respectively. They are also symbolized by a mid vowel in two cir-
cumstances. The first is if there is a minimal pair with a word that is based on the difference between the mid vowel and high vowel, as in 1.
7
1 [aisi]
aisi ‘sell’
[aisI] aise
‘buy’ The second environment where high lax vowels are written as a mid vowel is near a high vowel
that has the same frontback feature as the mid vowel, as in 2. 2
[Uru] oru
‘hair on the head’ The consonants of Olo are p, t, k, f, s, l, r, m, n, N, w, y as shown in table 2.2.
Table 2.2. Olo consonant chart labial
alveolar velar
stops p
t k
fricatives f
s lateral
l liquid
r nasals
m n
N semi-vowels
w y
The stops in Olo are lenis and unaspirated. Voicing is noncontrastive for stops. Olo has three nasals, the bilabial m, alveolar n, and velar N. While both the bilabial and alveolar nasals have full distri-
butions, the velar nasal only occurs before a velar stop. It is contrastive with the alveolar nasal as shown in 3.
The orthography for the consonants is regular and for the most part reflects the phonetic symbols given in table 2.2. The one distinction relates to the marking of the velar nasal. The distinction be-
tween the velar and alveolar nasals is made not on the nasals themselves, but rather on the velar stop. The orthographic symbols ng are phonetically [Ng]. All other occurrences of n are alveolar nasals in-
cluding the sequence of nk. The phonetic and orthographic representations are given in 3.
3 [wangu]
wanku ‘a man’s name’
1
[waNgu] wangu ‘land crab’
Stress is mostly predictable, occurring on the penultimate syllable. There are a few words which have the antepenultimate syllable stressed. A contrastive pair is given in 4.
4 wai.kó.pou
‘man’s name’ wá.ko.pou
‘wooden pestle’
2.3 Grammatical Characterization
