Author ORCID Identifier
Date of Award
Spring 6-14-2026
Document Type
Thesis (Undergraduate)
Department
Linguistics
First Advisor
Rolando Coto Solano
Abstract
This paper presents the first corpus study of the semantic and syntactic features of active, actor emphatic, and passive constructions in Cook Islands Māori, a Polynesian language of the Cook Islands. Using computational techniques, including Universal Dependencies parsing, this project identifies and evaluates these constructions in corpus data. The actor emphatic construction is of particular interest because it is only found in Eastern Polynesian languages. However, it has historically been difficult to study due to its cross-linguistic variability and relative infrequency. This study compiles, to my knowledge, the largest corpus of Cook Islands Māori actor emphatic sentences to date, analyzing 152 actor emphatic, 128 active, and 141 passive sentences. For each sentence, I manually annotated several semantic and syntactic factors, including the VAD of the verb, agent weight, agent and patient part of speech, and agent and patient animacy. Statistical analysis of these factors shed light on the issue of actancy in Cook Islands Māori. Evidence was found which supports the claim that Cook Islands Māori has developed further towards a fully nominative-accusative system than New Zealand Māori. However, it remains unclear whether this shift is ongoing or whether the current system is stable. Future work could strive to answer this question by incorporating historical corpus data.
Recommended Citation
Li, Daisy, "Computational Contrast of Argument-Adjusting Operations in Cook Islands Māori: An Initial Exploration" (2026). Linguistics Undergraduate Senior Theses. 3.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/linguistics_senior_theses/3
