Cheke Holo language

The phonology of Cheke Holo shows some peculiarities, shared with other Santa Isabel languages, like the aspirated stops and the voiceless sonorants. The five-vowel system instead conforms to the prototypical system of the Oceanic area.^[2] Boswell (2018) has /x/ rather than /ɣʰ/.^[3]

Verbs in Cheke Holo are marked neither for tense nor for person, although they can be prefixed with fa- (a causative marker) and they take enclitics. Among the possible clitics are the direct object pronouns, the completive aspect markers hi and hila, and the continuative aspect marker u.^[4]

Reduplication is commonly employed with verb roots to express iteration or intensification and as a valency changing device (from intransitive to transitive), although there are attested cases of adjective and (less so) noun reduplication.^[4] Different types of reduplications are possible in Cheke Holo:

• Full reduplication
  • /vra/ 'jump up' > /vravra/ 'be quick to act'
• Partial (or White's rule) reduplication
  • /bela/ 'wooden platform' > /beabela/ 'stack up firewood'
• Syllable reduplication
  • /nolo/ 'to walk' > /nonolo/ 'go walking about'
  • /kmokhu/ 'stop' > /kmokmohu/ 'continue to cease'
  • /fruni/ 'cover' > /fufruni/ 'cover completely' (when the second consonant of a cluster is /r/, this is dropped in the reduplicated syllable)