ABSTRACT
Interdisciplinary co-operation is a hallmark of cultural research in Polynesia. Anthropologists, linguists and archaeologists working in this region have tended to know each other and communicate their results to each other since about the middle of the present century, when work in the contemporary idioms of those disciplines began to emerge on the Polynesian culture area. This chapter presents the standard theory of Polynesian language subgrouping and then considers the specific problem of the position of Eastern Polynesian within Nuclear Polynesian. Revising Polynesian linguistic subgrouping and its culture history implications 103 beyond those cases established by Pawley, and is not true at all of Samoic-Outlier. The standard theory of Polynesian subgrouping' is recognized by its supporters and its detractors by that name. The chapter explores the progress of dialect development within Nuclear Polynesian at the time of the divergence of Eastern Polynesian.
