Tapua: ‘Polished ivory shrines’ of Tongan gods

Radiality: A Tongan Cultural Model

Non-Verbal Predicates in Tongan

In any head-driven theory of clause structure, where clauses are some sort of verbal category, the presence of clauses without an overt verb poses an interesting puzzle. Should or can the non-verbal clauses be assimilated to verbal clauses via a phonologically-null verb, or should they be analyzed in another way? This issue has been the subject of a fair amount of research in HPSG over the last...

You Shall Be as Gods

the religious testaments and presentday statements on human personality. The schism is only partly due to the need for specialisation of knowledge, and even as late as the twelfth century Moses Maimonides, living in Spain and writing in Arabic, was physician, philosopher, mathematician, and biblical commentator. The ghettos in Central Europe, in contrast, were created in a culture which separat...

The Morphosyntax of 2P Pronouns in Tongan

§ 1. Approaches to 2P Elements. Many languages exhibit grammatical categories that are referred to as ‘Second Position’ (henceforth ‘2P’) or ‘Wackernagel’ elements (Halpern & Zwicky 1996). These elements are typically functional morphs (often pronominal or auxiliary elements) which are phonologically weak and appear immediately after the first element of some constituent. Determination of what ...

Belief in moralizing gods

According to Alexander’s [Alexander, R. D. (1987). The biology of moral systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter] theory of morality, human social groups became large as a result of between-group competition over preferred habitats and resources, but although larger social groups are more successful in competition, they also experience more pressures to fission. Morality unites a society by limitin...