Bugenhagen, Robert D. (1990). Experiential constructions in Mangap-Mbula. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 183-215. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599441

A variety of constructions used to express experiential notions in the Austronesian language Mangap-Mbula are examined and their meanings explicated. By an “experiential situation” is meant a situation in which something “happens” to an animate entity – someone or something who is able to know that something is happening. Furthermore, the animate entity does not affect or produce any other entity, including himself/herself. Experiential situations are encoded in Mangap-Mbula by six overall construction types:

  1. uninflected experiential verbs with coreferential Experiencer Subjects and Objects
    This subclass contains just five items, two of which are explicated: menmeen ‘happy (about)’ and kaipa ‘selfishly rejoice (over)’.
    Since there are only a few verbs in the language which encode experiential notions, a number of other constructions are employed as well. They include:
  2. inflected experiential verbs with experiencer subjects
    This subclass includes verbs of knowledge; verbs of perception, including –re ‘see, look’ and –leŋ ‘hear, listen’; verbs encoding semi-controllable physical states; the verb –mbot ‘stay, be at, be alive’; verbs encoding emotional responses, including –morsop ‘be startled’, –murur ‘be surprised’, and –twer ‘worried about, longing for’); verbs encoding uncontrolled physical states; the verb –moto ‘fear’; the verb –mbel ‘be in trouble’
  3. inflected experiential verbs with experiencer objects
  4. a construction involving the verb –kam, a polysemous form which can be variously glossed as ‘do, cause, receive, get’
  5. a construction in which the forms le– and ka– are added immediately following the verb
  6. body image expressions
    More important than all of the above, however, are body image constructions, in which a body part plus a verb function together as a kind of composite predicate.

The final section of the paper is a study of the different encodings of the notion of ‘fear’.