Grammatical change in the Pacific. Frank Lichtenberk : in memoriam

Two key themes in Pacific linguistic research today are interconnectedness and, as one particular outcome of this, multilingualism. Historically, academics have often constructed the Pacific as 'tiny isolated dots' divided by 'imaginary lines across the sea' (Hau'ofa 1993: 7). In more recent years people have begun to realize that instead the region is a dynamic network in which navigational and seafaring prowess and long memories for exchange (cf. Strathern 1988; Thomas 1991) mean that the ocean connects rather than divides. While often by necessity anthropologists, historians and archaeologists have paid attention to interactions between Pacific peoples (e.g. trade and gift networks, marriage exchanges, war and migration), linguists more often have set these complications aside in order to study single languages at a single point in time, as spoken by the ideal speaker. This is necessary as a first approximation to a language description, as it makes the scope of a project manageable. But moving beyond this first approximation requires us to include interactions between speakers of different languages, and the effects of multilingualism in a community, in order to gain a richer, truer picture of the language system and of the region. Already in 1989 Peter Mühlhäusler called for a broader study of 'the complex underground life-lines' of the Pacific as the only way to discover 'explanatorily more powerful models of language change' (1989: 139) but only recently have the studies of individual languages and development of computer-assisted methods of collation and comparison progressed to a point where this wider perspective on research into contact and change is feasible.