The expansion of war and violence in Tok Pisin: a cognitive and corpus study on polysemy in pait and paitim

Abstract

From its early development, catalyzed by mass displacement and forced relocation of Melanesian people, Tok Pisin has flourished into a thriving language of mixed origins in Papua New Guinea. This honours thesis considers polysemy—which is when a word has multiple meanings that are related to one another—for war and violence vocabulary in Tok Pisin. Specifically, it presents a Cognitive Linguistic analysis of pait ‘fight’ and also the transitive form, paitim ‘hit’, that is rooted in corpus linguistics and etymology studies. It is shown that all the meanings associated with pait and paitim are polysemic and understandable through associative structures like metonymy and metaphor. The thesis’ methodology focuses on Cognitive Semantic analysis in order to identify polysemy and how these meaning extensions emerge through conceptual associations. This thesis also uses an adapted etymological tracing for Tok Pisin (Mühlhäusler 1984a), which is used to reconstruct the historical development of pait/paitim, in order to assist with the explanation of the polysemy. Corpus Linguistics methods are also integrated in the form of concordance, collocations, and n-grams, which are used to find co-occurring patterns and thus authentic usage patterns in a corpus. The Slone Corpus (Slone 2001a; Slone 2001b) of traditional Tok Pisin folktales from 1972–1997 from the Wantok Nuisepapa is used and compared with dictionary data from Mihalic (1971) and Volker (2024). Together, these approaches reveal how pait and paitim have created rich polysemy networks through usage, etymological layering, and cognitively motivated meaning extensions in Tok Pisin. While pait and paitim are associated with war and violence, through polysemy the meanings can extend into semantic domains such as taste, music, and more. Additionally, this thesis shows in what way all the extensions from both pait and paitim are connected and ultimately traced to pait ‘fight’. This thesis contributes to research on Tok Pisin by giving more insight into the semantics of war and violence. It also contributes to etymological studies and corpus linguistics for Tok Pisin. For Cognitive Linguistics for pidgincreoles, this thesis demonstrates the fruitfulness of this approach. Additionally, it models how lexical meaning develops, stabilizes and grows within Tok Pisin