10.1515/lingvan-2016-0092
https://zenodo.org/records/1069866
oai:zenodo.org:1069866
Rentz, Bradley
Bradley
Rentz
0000-0002-2893-6105
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Topological Relations in Pohnpeian
Zenodo
2017
Pohnpeian
Topological relations
linguistics
Federated States of Micronesia
classification tree
machine learning
Austronesian
Oceanic language
2017-08-01
eng
https://zenodo.org/communities/linguistics
Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International
This article explores a more nuanced understanding of topological relations in the Pohnpeian language (Austronesian). The BowPed Toolkit (Bowerman Melissa and Pederson Eric 1992. Topological relations picture series. In Space stimuli kit 1.2: November 1992, 51, Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/1992/bowped/ .) is employed as an elicitation tool with five Pohnpeian speakers. Evolutionary classification tree modeling is used as a discovery tool to find patterns in the data. The results show that the two prepositions in Pohnpeian, nan and ni, should be redefined in terms of topological relations as ‘containment’ and ‘attachment’ respectively. Likewise the meaning of some prepositional nouns are further revised.