Biak language

In Biak pronouns and articles are morphologically related, with both situating a given participant by indicating their relative discourse or spatial (e.g. directional or motional) status. This is not uncommon for Austronesian Languages.[11] Pronouns in Biak are marked for number and clusivity.

Free personal pronouns in Biak share their main distributional properties with nouns; however, they are somewhat more restricted. They can be used as a complement of a predicate or preposition but they cannot be used as subjects.[12] In the example below we can see the use of the 1st person personal pronoun aya to complement a verb while the second example shows how a free personal pronoun, in this clause 3rd person i cannot be used as a subject:

(1)	Badir	i	ve	aya
	2SG.announce	3SG	to	1SG
	"Make it known to me."

(2)	*	i	d-ores
		3SG	3SG-stand
		"He stood."

In Biak, pronominal affixes can combine with verbs in three possible inflection patterns (given in the table below), which are partly phonologically conditioned.[13]

Due to the person marking nature of these affixes, the need for the presence of a core noun phrase in the same clause is negated. Thus the following sentence is still grammatical without NP Rusa nanine, as the verb has a pronominal affix that gives the same information.

(1)	(Rusa	nan-i-ne)	d-ores
	deer	GIV-3SG.SPC-this	3SG-stand
	"This deer stood."

These pronominal markers are person markers and are found in the final position of the noun phrase they determine.[14] They attach to verbs along with a specifier that attaches after the pronominal affix; due to their distribution properties these markers should be considered clitics.[14] There are two specificity markers, -ya and –i, where –ya can be used in all positions and -i is restricted to positions before pauses.[14] In the example below the article attaches to the verb vebaya, rather than the verb ifrúr because it is the final verb in the noun phrase headed by for.[14]

(2)	i-frúr	for	ve-ba=ya
	3SG-make	fire	REL.big=3SG.SPC
	"He made a big fire."

Nonspecificity, which refers to entities that do not yet exist in this world, or is used to question or deny the existence of an entity, is marked with the articles –o for singular and –no for plural noun phrases.[15] This is shown in the examples below:

Non-specific

(3)	I-fúr	yuk=o	fa	y-ún	i	ve	Waranda.
	3SG-make	ukulele=nonSP.SG	CONS	1SG-take	3SG	to	The.Netherlands
	"He is making/will make a ukulele so that I can take it to the Netherlands"

Specific

(4)	I-fúr	yuk=ya	fa	y-ún	i	ve	Waranda.
	3SG-make	ukulele=nonSP.SG	CONS	1SG-take	3SG	to	The.Netherlands
	"He has made a ukulele so that I can take it to the Netherlands"

In alienable possession, a possessive pronominal is formed with the possessive marker ‘ve’ to signify the person, number and gender of the possessor, and is followed by a pronominal article marking the gender and number of the possessed. The pronominal article contains the specificity markers ‘-i’ and ‘-ya’, with ‘-i’ being used only in pre-pausal positions.[16] The following table illustrates the possessive pronominal construction.

Typically, Biak follows a possessor-possessum structure for alienable possessive construction, with the possessive pronominal in the adnominal position:

The Snake’s name was Kormsamba[18]  

However, alienable possession can also be formed in the order of possessum-possessor, though this is much less frequent:

Inalienable possessive construction differs from alienable in that there is no system of pronominal possessives, only a set of affixes located on the possessum. In contrast to alienable possession, inalienable possession can only take the order of possessor-possessum. Biak contains three subsets of inalienability: body parts, Kinship, and locational.[19]

Not all body parts are considered inalienable. Those that are form the stem words from which to derive other body parts through the method of compounding. For example, the alienable ‘knee’ is formed through the inalienable stem ‘we’ (leg) and the compounding ‘pur’ (back) to form ‘wepur’. Possessive construction for alienable body parts follows the same pattern as other alienable terms.[20] The inflectional system for inalienable body parts is as follows:

Unusual for Austronesian languages of the area, Biak contains a partial prefix system for inflecting inalienable body parts. For the plural forms, suffix ‘-s’ reflects plurality and animateness of possessor and suffix ‘na’ expresses plurality and inaninameteness of the possessum.[22] As stated above, inalienable possession is formed via a possessor-possessum structure:

Similarly to body parts, not all kinship terms are inalienable. The alienable kinship terms are formed through the same compounding method as alienable body parts, and follow the same possessive construction rules as other alienable terms.[24] This table illustrates the inflectional system for inalienable kinship words:

All nouns that follow the table's procedure have an idiosyncratic form for the first person, using a shorter term for the second and third person. (REF pg. 244) Here is an example of the usage of inalienable kinship inflection:

Locational nouns are the last distinction of inalienability found in Biak. Locational nouns refer to locations that are ‘inherently connected to an entity’.[26] For example, a tree in biak is referred to as having an ‘upper part’ and a ‘lower part’, and a canoe a ‘front’, a ‘middle’ and a ‘back’.[26] The following table exhibits the inflectional system for inalienable locational nouns:

The suffix ‘-n’ expresses the plurality and inanimateness of the possessum (REF pg. 250). The locational noun possessive structure is illustrated in this example:

The negator va occurs clause-finally in intransitive and transitive clauses.[28]

Intransitive

Transitive

In clauses with non-core arguments, va follows directly the argument it negates.

Va is also used to negate nominal clauses.

In complex clauses with fa, a conjunction expressing result, it seems that the negator va always occurs last in the sentence. In the corpus of spontaneous speech collected by van den Heuvel, there are no examples with va appearing at the end of the first clause.[34]

In other complex clauses the negator may follow the first or final clause.

Bukan is a loan from Malay/Indonesian. In Indonesian, the use of bukan, outside its function of negating noun phrases, expresses emphasis.[39] The use of bukan, in Biak also appears to express emphasis – in the examples given by van den Heuvel, it use occurs when a contrast is given. Bukan is used in combination with va. Bukan precedes the first verb and va is in its usual place at the end of the clause.[40]

The prohibitive marker awer is used to negate arguments in 1st, 2nd and 3rd person.[42]

1stperson

2nd person

3rd person

To express ‘not yet’, Biak uses the marker vanim/vaim. For ‘not any more’ wer va is used.[40]

In Austronesian Languages, the negator commonly precedes the predicate. So Biak, with clause final negation, is atypical in this feature. Clause final negation however, is a common feature in the region of the Eastern Bird's Head Peninsula, in both Austronesian and Papuan languages. It appears to be of Papuan origin.[46]