This paper tells the story of the form ve in Roon, a language of the South Halmahera West New Guinea branch of Austronesian.
The first part of this paper, of a synchronic orientation, provides a description of Roon ve in terms of 11 functions: DO, GIVE, SAY, verbalizer, reifier, possessive, BECOME, causative, dative, allative, and WANT/future. The question arises whether these functions are related, or mere instances of homophony; arguments are provided that all of the above functions are in fact connected to one another to variable degrees in a complex web of polyfunctional and macrofunctional relationships. These relationships are represented in terms of the following semantic map, in which each of the 18 connecting lines can be independently supported, invoking criteria such as semantic affinity and cross-linguistic replicability:
The second part of this paper, of a diachronic nature, focuses on DO/GIVE coexpression. Although cross-linguistically rare (4.3% of a worldwide sample of 805 languages), DO/GIVE coexpression occurs frequently in the languages of the East Bird’s Head and Cenderawasih Bay region, where it is attested in four different etymons spanning four different linguistic families: (1) ve and cognates, in Roon, Dusner, Waropen and Umar (Austronesian) plus Yawa (isolate);
(2) ong and cognates, in Pom, Serewen, Wooi, Ansus and Wamesa (Austronesian);
(3) eita and cognates, in Meyah and Moskona (East Bird’s Head);
and (4) yai (Hatam).
This paper argues that DO/GIVE coexpression originated in a serial verb construction in which the notion of GIVE was expressed by the juxtaposition of two verbs, DO and GO; as the second GO verb grammaticalized into an adposition, the locus of the GIVE meaning was telescoped from the construction as a whole into the first verb, DO, resulting in DO/GIVE coexpression. Originally occurring in non-Austronesian languages, DO/GIVE coexpression was adopted by the incoming Austronesian languages, where it was first expressed with reflexes of Proto-Central-Eastern-Malayo-Polynesian *bai DO, such as Roon ve, before being subsequently replaced, in some Western-Yapen languages, with ong and its cognates, probably borrowed from a now-extinct Trans-New-Guinea substrate language.
Thus, the story of Roon ve reinforces a view of the Austronesian expansion into the Indonesian archipelago and New Guinea in which language contact played a central role, leading to the decoupling of linguistic features from associated genes and cultural packages, as is typically the case in processes such as metatypy and creolization.