A Look at Tok Pisin save: A Lexical Verb and an Aspectual Marker in a Cultural Context

Abstract

This paper studies a common Tok Pisin lexical verb and auxiliary save ‘know’; ‘habitual’, respectively, and its prominent uses in examples of social interaction described in one section of the Wantok magazine and a Papua New Guinean writer’s short narrative. The linguistic material examined here seems to point to the semantic category of ‘social relationship nouns’ (SRNs) as relevant to the contextually and culturally adequate understanding of the examined examples of Tok Pisin usage.