Cut-verbs of the Oceanic language Teop: A critical study of collecting and analysing data in a language documentation project

Teop is an Oceanic language spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and has been documented for more than two decades in close collaboration with a team of native speakers from coastal villages of the Tinputz region.¹ The present study of Teop CUT-verbs was inspired by Anna Wierzbicka when she invited me to a workshop on endangered meanings held in Canberra in 2013. Having been a tutor for her courses in the ’90s, I soon realised that the English translation equivalents of Teop CUT-verbs in the Teop Language Corpus do not provide sufficient information for a semantic analysis, because the translators