Acknowledgements
(Categorically List these People:)
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Introduction to principal consultants, institutions, and their contributions
The descriptions herein reflect my own analyses, however they would not have been possible without the generosity, input, and support of many. Among those who have my heartfelt gratitude are the people of Sula and Ternate who have a vested interest in my research and who welcomed me into their communities with open arms—from the mehi-nana who walked through the jungle to track me down and verify that I had collected particular words they thought I should know, to the piamatua who shared their wisdom and went out of their way to keep me safe and comfortable (and incredibly well fed). Among all who in some way or other contributed to the success of this work, the following people stood out:
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I also relied heavily on guidance from experienced fieldworkers and from a number of books. Some of the people who shared their valuable experience were: my mentor, Robert Blust, the foremost authority on the Austronesian language family and a walking compendium of world language and historical linguistic knowledge; Gary Holton, a person who achieves more in a year than I will in a lifetime—who in between ultramarathons, circumnavigation of remote pacific islands by kayak, and mountain bike races over Alaskan snow, still makes time to tackle colossal academic projects, conduct fieldwork everywhere, edit volumes in hours where others would take weeks, and have long, challenging advisory meetings over beer. Gary taught me how to sketch a grammar, and—no exaggeration—once ran a 100 mile cross-country marathon and then came in to the university on an untreated broken toe and read over a draft of my work and sent me helpful feedback before seeking medical treatment and returning to teach a seminar by afternoon.
Other important mentors were Lyle Campbell, who shared a wealth of information on world languages and his experiences with fieldwork; Albert Schutz, who more than anyone took a deep interest in my work and academic success, and who shared so much from his decades of experience working in the Pacific; and Katie Drager and Ken Rehg, whose courses on endangered languages and field linguistics provoked many topics I had never considered so that I would not be caught blind.
Foremost among the books I referenced were Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists by Thomas Edward Payne and Essentials of Language Documentation edited by Jost Gippert, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Ulrike Mosel. I do not cite either volume heavily in this dissertation, as I do not reference their specific points, but they were instrumental in enabling me to recognize challenging situations (both linguistically and socially) and provide me with frameworks to make plans accordingly. Hands down though, the most useful volume I had for the early stages of approaching an undocumented language is one that was not specifically written for that purpose: The Syntax Files is a document under perpetual revision and improvement in William O’Grady’s endless pursuit of perfection and his passion for pedagogy. The volume is a course book for the second most difficult course I have ever taken. This volume is a collection of tests and proofs to identify syntactic patterns in languages, and it is arranged in an order that comprises a logical template for a syntactic grammar. As a beginning linguist with only one year of study under my belt when I first visited Sula, and with no Sula language learning materials to reference, this book and O’Grady’s course gave me the skills to break apart the foreign utterances I was hearing, find the units of meaning, and then begin to decode their arrangement.
In short: Robert Blust helped me choose Sula as my research focus, and he gave me the skills to analyze it within its language family. Yuko Otsuka taught me to find its words, and William O’Grady taught me how to figure out how they go together to form sentences. Patricia Donegan taught me the skills to discern how Sula’s sounds are grouped, and Victoria Anderson gave me the ability to find those sounds in the first place. Katie Drager introduced many of the challenges facing endangered language communities and she taught me how to see language variation in terms of society, Ken Rehg made me think a lot about ethical topics surrounding fieldwork, and Gary Holton taught me how to handle fieldwork logistics, how to incorporate my findings into a ‘big picture’, and how to organize and compile my findings.