A Palauan Linguistic Bibliography

Compiled by Justin Nuger, with the help of Kie Zuraw. All linked PDF files are distributed with permission of their associated authors. If there is anything you feel should be added or amended, please get in touch with Justin. Last update: 3 February 2011.

Campana, Mark. 1988. Mood and Binding in Palauan. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics/Cahiers Linguistiques de McGill 5(1): 163-190.
Campana, Mark. 2000. The Structure of Inflection in Palauan. In Ileana Paul, Vivianne Phillips, and Lisa Travis (eds.), Formal Issues in Austronesian Linguistics, 1-25. Dordrecht: Kluwer. [Google Book | Amazon | Early Minimalist analysis of irrealis subject agreement prefixes; also challenges the VOS analysis.]
Capell, Arthur. 1949. A Grammar of the Language of Palau. Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology (CIMA) 1947-1949. Part 6b of the Final Report to the Pacific Science Board, National Research Council. [Older English grammar; while more limited than Josephs 1975, contains interesting observations not discussed in that work.]
Capell, Arthur. 1957. Palau possessives and problems in morpheme identification. Oceania 27: 273-282.
Carlson, Clayton. 1968. Palauan Phonology. MA Thesis: University of Hawaii.
Cherney, Lynn. 1993. The Role of Agreement and Modality in Palauan. In Jonathan Mean (ed.), The Proceedings of the Eleventh West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics [WCCFL 11], 78-92. Stanford: CSLI. [Google Book | Amazon]
Chung, Sandra & Carol Georgopoulos. 1988. Agreement with Gaps in Chamorro and Palauan. In Michael Barlow and Charles A. Ferguson (eds.), Agreement in Natural Language: Approaches, Theories, Descriptions, 251-267. Stanford: CSLI. [CSLI | Amazon | Discussion of the Wh-Agreement phenomenon.]

Ur Shlonsky. 1990. Language 66: 820-826. [Review]

Clark, Robin. 1983. Clitics in Palauan. MA Thesis: University of California, Los Angeles. [Analysis of perfective object agreement suffixes as clitics.]
Conant, Carlos Everett. 1915. Notes on the Phonology of the Palau Language. Journal of the American Oriental Society 35: 1-15. [JSTOR]
DeWolf, Charles M. 1976. A syntactic analysis of the pronoun system of Palauan. In University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics 8.2, 101-110.
DeWolf, Charles M. 1979, Sentential predicates: a cross-linguistic analysis. PhD Dissertation: University of Hawaii.
DeWolf, Charles M. 1985. Word and paradigm in Latin and Palauan: a study in morphological typology. In Veneeta Z. Acson & Richard L. Leed (eds.), For Gordon H. Fairbanks, 257-270. Oceanic Linguistics special publication No. 20. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
DeWolf, Charles M. 1988. Voice in Austronesian languages of Philippine type: passive, ergative, or neither? In Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), Passive and Voice, 143-193. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [Places Palauan verb morphology in a comparative context; argues for a Nominative-Accusative analysis of Palauan.]
Embick, David. 2010. Localism versus Globalism in Morphology and Phonology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. [MIT Press | Includes a Distributed Morphology analysis of the Palauan past tense infix -il-.]
Finer, Daniel L. 1986. Reduplication and verbal morphology in Palauan. The Linguistic Review 6: 99-130.
Flora, Jo-Ann. 1969. Analysis of the Segmental Phonemes of Palauan. Languages and Linguistics 4 (1): 1-30.
Flora, Jo-Ann. 1974a. Palauan Phonology and Morphology. PhD Dissertation: University of California, San Diego.
Flora, Jo-Ann. 1974b. The Palauan /m/ Affix. Oceanic Linguistics 13 (1/2) [Papers of the First International Conference on Comparative Austronesian Linguistics, 1974: Proto-Austronesian and Western Austronesian]: 213-227.
Flora, Jo-Ann. 1978. Reduplication in Palauan. In Stephan A. Wurm & Lois Carrington (eds.), Second International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics: Proceedings, 617-655. Fascicle 1: Western Austronesian. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics C-61.
Flora, Jo-Ann. 1984. Schwa in Palauan. In Byron Bender (ed.), Studies in Micronesian Linguistics, 149-164. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics C-80.
Georgopoulos, Carol. 1984a. On Belauan Islands: A Study in Agreement Morphology. In Claudia Brugman, Monica Maccaulay, Amy Dahlstrom, Michele Emanatian, Birch Moonwoman, and Catherine O'Connor (eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society [BLS 10], 17-20. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Georgopoulos, Carol. 1984b. Resumptive Pronouns, Syntactic Binding, and Levels of Representation in Belauan. In Charles Jones & Peter Sells (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society [NELS XIV], 81-97. Amherst: GLSA.
Georgopoulos, Carol. 1985. Variables in Palauan Syntax. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3: 59-94. [SpringerLink]
Georgopoulos, Carol. 1986a. Palauan as a VOS Language. In Paul Geraghty, Lois Carrington, and Stephen A. Wurm (eds.), FOCAL I: Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, 187-198. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, C-93.
Georgopoulos, Carol. 1986b. The Syntax of Variable Binding in Palauan. PhD Dissertation: University of California, San Diego. [Published as Georgopoulos 1991a.]
Georgopoulos, Carol. 1991a. Syntactic Variables: Resumptive Pronouns and A' Binding in Palauan. Dordrecht: Kluwer. [Google Book | A GB analysis of A' constructions in Palauan: extensive and useful as a reference for other language facts.]
Georgopoulos, Carol. 1991b. Canonical Government and the Specifier Parameter: An ECP Account of Weak Crossover. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 9: 1-46. [SpringerLink]
Georgopoulos, Carol. 1991c. On Psych Predicates. In Carol Georgopoulos & Roberta Ishihara (eds.), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language: Essays in Honor of S.-Y. Kuroda, 217-238. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Georgopoulos, Carol. 1992. Another Look at Object Agreement. In Kimberly Broderick (ed.), Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society [NELS 22], 165-177. Amherst, Mass.: GLSA.
Gerassimova, Veronica. 2005. Unbounded Dependency Constructions in Western Austronesian. PhD Dissertation: Stanford University.
Gibson, Robert. 1993. Palauan Causatives and Passives: An Incorporation Analysis. PhD Dissertation: University of Hawaii. [PDF | Analysis of causative verb morphology derived by movement and discussion of the Palauan "ergative" (Wilson 1972, Josephs 1975)/"middle" (Flora 1974) construction.]
Haïk, Isabelle. 1990. Anaphoric, Pronominal and Referential INFL. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8: 347-374. [SpringerLink]
Hagège, Claude. 1986. La Langue Palau: une Curiosité Typologique. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
Hockin, John Pearce. 1803. A supplement to the account of the Pelew Islands; compiled from the journals of the Panther and Endeavour, two vessels sent by the honourable East India Company to those islands in the year 1790; and from the oral communications of Captain H. Wilson. London: W. Bulmer & Co. [Contains wordlist, longer than the one in Keate 1788, also called “A vocabulary of the Pelew language.”]
Hsu, Robert. 1960. Palauan Phonemics. MA Thesis: Georgetown University.
Johannes, R.E. 1981. Words of the lagoon: fishing and marine lore in the Palau district of Micronesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Amazon | Contains a glossary of Palauan terms for various marine life, with their scientific names, and a few other fishing terms; many words not found in other dictionaries.]

John Cordell. 1982. American Anthropologist. New Series: Vol. 84, No. 3. pp. 718-720. [Review]

Josephs, Lewis. 1975. Palauan Reference Grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. [Covers many aspects of Palauan grammar; syntactic analyses mostly outdated but nevertheless very useful as a reference!]

Sandra Chung. 1978. Language 54 (3): 733-737. [Review]

Josephs, Lewis. 1984. The impact of borrowing on Palauan. In Byron Bender (ed.), Studies in Micronesian Linguistics, 81-123. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics C-80.
Josephs, Lewis. 1990. New Palauan-English Dictionary. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. [UH Press | Amazon | Google Book | Actually a (mostly) bidirectional bilingual dictionary: contains an extensive English "finder list" to locate the relevant Palauan entries.]
Josephs, Lewis. 1997. Handbook of Palauan Grammar: Volume I. Koror: Ministry of Education, Republic of Palau. [Palauan Senate Bill No. 7-79 adopts this and Josephs (1999) as the standard for Palauan orthography and grammar, pending any future revisions/extensions by the Palau Orthography Commission.]

Robert Gibson. 1999. Oceanic Linguistics 38 (2/2): 436-440. [Review (JSTOR) | Review (Muse)]

Josephs, Lewis. 1999. Handbook of Palauan Grammar: Volume II. Koror: Ministry of Education, Republic of Palau.
Kawamura, Tomoko. 2005. Fixed Segmentism in Palauan Multiple Reduplications. Ms., Stony Brook University.
Keate, George. 1788. An account of the Pelew Islands, situated in the western part of the Pacific Ocean. Composed from the journals and communications of Captain Henry Wilson, and some of his officers, who, in August 1783, were there shipwrecked, in the Antelope. Dublin: Luke White. [Contains wordlist “A vocabulary of the Pelew languages.”]
Kitalong, Karla Saari & Tino Kitalong. Complicating the Tourist Gaze: Literacy and the Internet as Catalysts for Articulating a Postcolonial Palauan Identity. In Gail E. Hawisher & Cynthia L. Selfe (eds.), Global Literacies and the World Wide Web, 95-113. London: Routledge. [Google Book | Amazon]
Lemaréchal, Alain. 1983. Pour une révision de la notion de transitivité. Linguistique: Revue de la Société Internationale de Linguistique Fonctionnelle/Journal of the International Society for Functional Linguistics 19 (1): 95-118.
Lemaréchal, Alain. 1986. Syntaxe, morphologie et genèse de la forme dite «hypothétique» du palau. Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientale 15 (1): 129-170.
Lemaréchal, Alain. 1991. Problèmes de sémantique et de syntaxe en Palau. Paris: Presses du CNRS. [French language.]

Lewis Josephs. 1994. Oceanic Linguistics 33 (1/2): 231-256. [Review]

Lemaréchal, Alain. 1993. Pluriel, animéité et référentialité en palau. Faits de langues 2: 169-177.
Malsol, Yosko. 1999. Palauan Language Workbook. Ms., Koror, Palau. [Electronic copy exists.]
Mitchell, Roger. 1989. The Palauan Story-Board: The Evolution of a Folk Art Style. In Elliott Oring (ed.), Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, 320-328. Logan: Utah State University Press. [Amazon]
Nakamura, Masanori. 2002. On Feature Movement. In Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, Sjef Barbiers, and Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds.), Dimensions of Movement: From Features to Remnants, 243-267. Amsterdam: Benjamins. [Benjamins | Amazon]
Nuger, Justin. 2007. The Case of Objects. Ms., UC Santa Cruz. [PDF | A Minimalist analysis of Palauan differential object marking and object agreement; see also Woolford 2000 for an OT account.]
Nuger, Justin. 2008. Variations on the Palauan Theme. Ms., UC Santa Cruz. [PDF | A Minimalist/Distributed Morphology analysis of Palauan passives and transitive verb predicates.]
Nuger, Justin. 2009. On Downward-Entailing Existentials and Differential Object Marking in Palauan. In Sandra Chung, Daniel Finer, Ileana Paul, and Eric Potsdam (eds.), Proceedings of AFLA 16, 137–151. London, Ont.: AFLA Proceedings Project. [PDF | Shorter version of Nuger 2007 summarizing the key points.]
Nuger, Justin. 2010. Architecture of the Palauan Verbal Complex. PhD Dissertation: UC Santa Cruz. [PDF]
Nuger, Justin. 2011 (to appear). The Syntactic Structure of Palauan Resultatives. In Proceedings of PLC 34. Philadelphia: Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 7.1. [PDF | Argues for a Distributed Morphology analysis of Palauan resultative predicates.]
Nuger, Justin. 2011 (to appear). Implicit Arguments and Unaccusative Syntax: Evidence from Palauan. In Proceedings of AFLA 17. London, Ont.: AFLA Proceedings Project. [PDF | Explores the syntax of Palauan intransitive me- verbs and argues for a unified unaccusative syntactic analysis.]
Parmentier, Richard J. 1993. The Political Function of Reported Speech: A Belauan Example. In John A. Lucy (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, 261-286. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Book | Amazon]
Pätzold, Klaus. 1969. Die Palau-Sprache und ihre Stellung zu anderen indonesischen Sprachen. PhD Dissertation: Universität Hamburg.

Isidore Dyen. 1971. Journal of the Polynesian Society 80(2): 247-258. [Review]

Ramarui, Augusta N. & Melii K. Temael. 2000. Kerresel a Klechibelau: Tekoi er a Belau me a Omesodel [Palauan Language Lexicon]. Koror: Belau National Museum. [Monolingual Palauan dictionary with 13,791 entries.]

Robert Gibson. 2007. Language Documentation & Preservation 1: 123-125. [Review]

Smith, Kyle D. & Debbie Tkel-Sbal. 1995. Prototype Analyses of Emotion Terms in Palau, Micronesia. In James A. Russell, José-Miguel Fernández-Dols, Anthony S. R. Manstead, and Jane C. Wellenkamp (eds.), Everyday Conceptions of Emotion: An Introduction to the Psychology, Anthropology and Linguistics of Emotion, 85-102. Dordrecht: Kluwer. [Google Book | Amazon]
Smith, Michael B. 2006. Reference Point Constructions, the Underspecification of Meaning, and the Conceptual Structure of Palauan er. Oceanic Linguistics 45: 1-20. [Muse]
Tkel-Sbal, Debbie. 1996. Conversational Palauan. Mangilao: Micronesian Language Institute, University of Guam. [Handbook for teachers to prepare an introductory course in spoken Palauan. Not consistent orthographically; pronunciations not marked. Can be followed by non-Palauans after phonological facts are understood; see e.g. Wilson (1972).]
Umetaro, Steve. 1974. BELAU: Uchelel Belau er a Uab el me er a Miladeldil [PALAU: The Beginning of Palau from Uab to Miladeldil]. Koror: Department of Education. [Palauan PDF | English PDF]
Useem, John H. 1949. Report on Palau. National Research Council, Pacific Science Board. [Contains very short glossary of Palauan words.]
Walleser, P. Salvator. 1911. Grammatik der Palausprache. Mitteilung des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen 14: 121-231. [German language.]
Walleser, P. Salvator. 1913. Palau-Wörterbuch. Hong Kong: Mission Society. [German language.]
Waters, Richard C. 1980. Topicalization and Passive in Palauan. Ms., MIT. [PDF]
Wilson, Helen. 1972. The Phonology and Syntax of Palauan Verb Affixes. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics 4.5. [Electronic copy exists.]
Woolford, Ellen. 2000. Object Agreement in Palauan: Specificity, Humanness, Economy and Optimality. In Ileana Paul, Vivianne Phillips, and Lisa Travis (eds.), Formal Issues in Austronesian Linguistics, 215-245. Dordrecht: Kluwer. [Google Book | Amazon | ROA-55: UMOP Ms. | An OT analysis of the differential object marking pattern; also explored in Nuger 2007.]
Zobel, Erik. 2002. The position of Chamorro and Palauan in the Austronesian family tree: evidence from verb morphosyntax. In Fay Wouk & Malcolm D. Ross (eds.), The History and Typology of Western Austronesian Voice Systems, 405-434. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics; 518.
Zuraw, Kie. 2003. Vowel Reduction in Palauan Reduplicants. In Andrea Rackowski & Norvin Richards (eds.), Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association [AFLA 8], 385-398. Cambridge: MITWPL #44. [ROA-787 | An OT account of vowel and diphthong reduction using Crosswhite's constraints on unstressed vowel nuclei.]
Zuraw, Kie. 2007. Extrapolation of generalizations from existing words to new words: Palauan suffixation. Handout of talk given at the 14th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistic Association. McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. [A learnability account of Palauan noun possession which aims to predict which vowel will surface in novel words.]