Tiri (Ciri,îrî Tĩrĩ), or Mea (Ha Mea), is an Oceanic language of New Caledonia.
Grammar
Pronouns and person marking
Tîrî has two types of pronouns: personal pronouns, which make reference to person, number and case, and impersonal pronouns, which only have one respective form and are more restricted in their use (Osumi, 1995, p. 38).
Like all other nominals in Tîrî, pronouns can occupy various positions throughout the clause (Osumi, 1995, p. 37). They may appear as the nominal subject of the verb, marked by the subject marker nrâ and agreeing in person and number with the subject pronoun in the predicate; the object of a verb; the object of a preposition; or the head of a predicate (Osumi, 1995, pp. 37–38).
When they appear within the verb phrase, personal pronouns show agreement in person and number with the nominal subject that optionally follows the predicate (Osumi, 1995, p. 38).
Personal pronouns in Tîrî also mark listener clusivity in the first person non-singular, and are generally used for human referents (Osumi, 1995, p. 39). The below example shows appropriate usage of the third person singular nrâ (not to be confused with the latter nrâ, which is acting as a subject marker for the optional nominal subject toni).
Although the third person pronoun can be used for non-human entities (while the first and second person pronouns generally only refer to humans), speakers tend to use it in its singular form even when there is more than one referent, as seen below (Osumi, 1995, p. 39).
As indicated in the table above, Tîrî pronouns change form depending on whether they are being used as subjective, objective or free forms, the latter encompassing a variety of other pronoun usages, such as pronouns that have been topicalized and occur sentence-initially, as seen below (Osumi, 1995, pp. 39–40).
While they are classified as pronouns as they fill the subject pronoun slot, Tîrî's two impersonal pronouns show less flexibility than personal pronouns. They do not show any distinction for person or number and occur only in their respective forms of hêrrê and va, are unable to appear anywhere other than the subject pronoun position (the first element in the verb phrase), and are never followed by a nominal subject (Osumi, 1995, p. 41).
Speakers use hêrrê to refer to any number of unspecified entities when they do not wish to or are not concerned with specifying a referent as the agent of an action (Osumi, 1995, p. 41), as in the example below.
This contrasts with the below example, which is more likely to be used by a speaker who wishes to imply that a particular person has committed the same act (Osumi, 1995, p. 42).
While hêrrê is typically used to refer to humans, the impersonal pronoun va is used similarly to refer to non-human referents, though this is not always the case (Osumi, 1995, p. 43). Va behaves much as the English pronouns it and that insofar as they can refer to both particular things (e.g. Did it bite you?; What's that over there?) as well as propositions (e.g. It's the truth.; That's a lie.), as demonstrated below (Osumi, 1995, p. 43).
Subject pronouns may be used in conjunction with the tense-aspect markers ei 'future' and a 'perfect, actual, definite', in which case a number of pronouns may change their phonological form (see the below example, in which the second person singular ke has been combined with a) (Osumi, 1995, p. 170).
Possession
Tîrî, like most Oceanic languages, exhibits many types of possessive constructions, including possessive prepositions, possessive classifiers and bound-form nouns (Osumi, 1995, pp. 144). Classic possessive constructions involve two nominals that indicate the referent of one is possessed by the other. Tîrî has two types of possessive relationships, inalienable possession and alienable possession (Osumi, 1995, pp. 145). Inalienable possession describes an inherent relationship between two referents such as kinship, while alienable possession describes a non-inherent relationship such as temporary ownership or voluntary association (Osumi, 1995, pp. 145).
Alienable possession
In Tîrî, alienable possession can occur in two ways. The first is when the noun possessed is followed by a possessive preposition and then by a pronominal or nominal processor (Osumi, 1995, pp. 145). The second is when the noun possessed occurs in apposition with a possessive classifier (Osumi, 1995, pp. 145).
Possessive prepositions
Prepositions are included in a closed set of grammatical words that are placed immediately before a noun phrase and express a syntactic relationship between the noun phrase and a predicate or another noun phrase (Osumi, 1995, pp. 145).