"Program for the 2007 theme year"--Page 1.

Niue is a small Pacific island nation located 2,400 kilometers northeast of New Zealand. The island, with a population of approximately 1,600 people, has a rich history and culture that is reflected in its unique language, traditional crafts, and dance. Niueans are Polynesians, with their culture, religion and way of life intertwined with the environment. The island is known for its crystal-clear waters and coral reefs, making it a popular destination for tourists seeking adventure and relaxation. The island has been inhabited for over 1,000 years and was discovered by Captain James Cook in 1774. Niue gained independence in 1974 from New Zealand but still maintains a special relationship with it. The island is self-governed but is supported by New Zealand in areas such as defense and foreign affairs. Niue’s economy is primarily driven by tourism, selling of postage stamps, and the use of its internet domain name, .nu. The small island has faced challenges such as cyclones and economic struggles, but its unique culture and strong community continue to thrive. Overall, Niue is a fascinating and unique destination with a rich cultural history that is intertwined with its breathtaking natural environment.

This volume explores the grammar of Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue and in New Zealand, with a focus on the issue of predication. Since Aristotle, it has been claimed that a sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. Niuean constitutes the perfect testing ground for this claim: it displays verb-subject-object word order, in which the subject interrupts the predicate, and has an ergative case system, in which subjects are not clearly distinguished from objects in their marking for grammatical case. Diane Massam uses the framework of generative grammar to carry out a detailed analysis of the internal structure of Niuean predicates and arguments, as well as the relations between them, touching on many other topics including the nature of displacement, word formation, determiners, and thematic roles. The proposal is that Niuean complex predicates are formed via successive inversion, prior to the merge of all arguments (high argument merge), and that the predicate undergoes fronting to initial position across the arguments, with the same structure found also in nominal clauses. The conclusion is that Niuean does not have a subject in the usual sense, and this is related to the fact that the language has isolating morphology, lacking all tense and agreement inflection and nominative case. Instead, the language exhibits low absolutive predication, applicative ergative agents, and predicate fronting in lieu of subject extraction. The book extends our understanding of cross-linguistic sentence structure and grammatical case, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, typology, and theoretical linguistics.

This volume contains twelve chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies in this volume cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, Jakaltek, Mam, Lummi (Straits Salish), Niuean, Malagasy, Palauan, K'echi', and Zapotec, from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Minimalism, information structure, and sentence processing. The first book to take a cross-linguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to some old problems and debates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order.

This volume contains twelve chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies in this volume cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, Jakaltek, Mam, Lummi (Straits Salish), Niuean, Malagasy, Palauan, K'echi', and Zapotec, from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Minimalism, information structure, and sentence processing. The first book to take a cross-linguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to some old problems and debates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order.

Tapa, or barkcloth, is called 'hiapo' in the language of Niue island in central Polynesia. Most known pieces of hiapo were produced between 1850 and 1900. They are now dispersed, largely in museum collections, all over the world. The illustrations in this book, most of which are in full colour, bring together hiapo from all over the world. The authors have worked on the project for a decade, visiting museums, collecting information, travelling to Niue, talking to old people there, trying to find out how the paintings were done and who made them.

The first world atlas ever compiled on vernacular architecture, this comprehensive work illustrates the variety and ingenuity of the world’s vernacular building traditions from a multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural and comparative approach, using over sixty world and regional maps. Mapping such diverse aspects as materials and resources, technologies, structural systems, symbolism, forms and service systems on a cross-cultural and comparative basis, the Atlas of Vernacular Architecture of the World reveals the distribution, diversity and relationships of the world’s vernacular building traditions. Indicating geographical patterns, developments, lacunae and anomalies, it gives rise to new insights and understandings, stimulating new hypotheses, questions and research efforts. Augmenting the award-winning Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, the Atlas of Vernacular Architecture of the World constitutes a unique and unparalleled resource for anyone involved in the growing field of vernacular architecture studies, including architects, geographers, art historians, planners, folklorists, conservationists, builders, and anthropologists as well as being of use to all those working in the fields of heritage conservation, architecture, regeneration, energy efficient building, resources management, development and sustainability.

This book examines general questions and particular cases of climate-change related mobility, and explores their implications for the social sciences.