Clause combining in Sumbawa, Indonesia

International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 2020

This paper compares the simple clause structure in three languages of Kyerepong (Okere), Akuapem Twi and English. Again, the paper discusses how the structures mark focus and topic; and how they are used in copula and locative constructions. The paper comprises seven main parts. The first part gives a brief linguistic background of the two Ghanaian languages. The second part looks at the constituent order of the three languages; and the third considers the phonological processes involved. The remaining parts (which constitute the hub of the paper) focus on how the simple clause in these three languages is used in focus, topic, copula and locative constructions.

2022

This thesis examines the copulas ialah and adalah in Malay on different levels of linguistic analysis, in different periods in time, and against different genetically related languages. Addressing the scarcity of research on copular clauses in Malay in all three areas, namely synchrony, diachrony, and typology, this thesis aims to serve as a point of reference for future study on nonverbal predication in Malay and beyond. The synchronic portion of the thesis begins with a demonstration of the monomorphemic nature of the two copulas, which no longer exhibit the morphosyntax, semantics, and information structure of the morphemes that they appear to comprise, viz. 3rd person ia, existential verb ada, and focus marker lah. Following that, several syntactic and semantic phenomena, including extraction from copular clauses, copular inversion, and overt vs. zero encoding of the copula, are investigated. Lastly, the derivation of clefts in Malay is examined, which I reveal to be a type of copular construction despite the absence of an overt copula. I then show that the derivation of a cleft feeds the further derivation of a pseudocleft via remnant movement. In the history of Malay, ialah and adalah are shown to have emerged relatively recently, that is towards the end of the Classical Malay era, circa the 18th to 19th century. Ialah grammaticalised from the combination of 3rd person pronoun ia and comment marker lah in a topical construction that involved left dislocation. Specifically, the topic was reanalysed as the canonical subject, which subsequently forced the resumptive pronoun to undergo Spec-to-Head reanalysis, resulting in ialah grammaticalising into a copula heading TP. Meanwhile, adalah grammaticalised from semantically vacuous support auxiliary ada, also in combination with comment marker lah. Both copulas originally developed from the need to provide a host for the comment marker as a way of avoiding a violation of the stray affix filter. The typological survey of copular clauses in Austronesian reveals that syntactic alignment and word order play a central role in the emergence of copulas in a language. Of the 40 languages examined, all the 19 languages that have overt copulas are accusatively aligned, except the ergatively aligned Formosan language Puyuma, which entails that ergative-absolutive and split ergative languages within Austronesian are statistically very unlikely to have overt copulas. In addition to that, 20 of the 25 accusatively aligned languages have SVO word order, whilst all of the 9 ergatively aligned languages have VSO word order. The word order of the language is relevant as all but two of the 19 languages with overt copulas have SVO word order. In consideration of these findings, I argue that the correlation among the three factors is such that change from ergative to accusative alignment triggers change in word order from verb-initial order to verb-medial order, and that this is conducive to the emergence of overt copulas. Furthermore, word order plays a crucial role in the emergence of overt copulas as they may develop in topical constructions following reanalysis of the left-dislocated topic as the canonical subject, as argued in the diachronic portion of the thesis. Given this path of development, I argue that pronominal copulas have not been able to develop in the ergatively aligned Philippine-type languages due to the lack of the notion of subject and the absence of the canonical subject position, which prevents reanalysis of left-dislocated topics as canonical subjects and subsequently resumptive pronouns as copulas, as undergone by the Malay copula ialah. In addition to that, verbal copulas cannot develop from posture verbs in the Philippine-type languages because of the clash between the unergative nature of posture verbs and the unaccusative nature of the copula, which presents a problem in the Philippine-type languages due to the encoding of the agent argument on the verb in the actor voice. Besides, the strict intransitive nature of the copular clause is incompatible with other voice alternations such as the benefactive and the locative, as the trigger in these voice alternations is encoded as an applied argument, making the clause transitive. Verbs of becoming also cannot copularise in the Philippine-type languages via semantic bleaching of the inchoative aspect, due to the robust morphological marking of aspect on the verb.

Ghana Journal of Linguistics, 2021

Toposa, an Eastern Nilotic language of South Sudan, has been identified as a clause-chaining language (Schröder 2013, Schröder 2020), because it does not allow two independent clauses following each other, but the fundamental sentence structure is that an independent clause is followed by a chained clause. The current paper claims that this clause-chaining constraint creates new syntactic and semantic functions of independent and subordinative clauses, whereby one syntactic function is clause-skipping that caters for adverbial clauses in the model. The structure of independent clause and chained clause yields semantically a distinction of foreground and background information. The foreground information is carried by the finite and the background information by the non-finite clauses. The interpretation of the foreground and background information is explained as cognitive pragmatic routines that guide the hearer to understand the foreground information as main events and the background information as explanations to the foreground information. The background information captured in the adverbial clauses provide explanations for time, reasonresult, means-result, purpose, conditions and contrast. The pragmatic analysis is based on the insights of Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995).

Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 2019

This paper discusses the morphosyntactic properties of relative clause constructions in the Runyankore-Rukiga language cluster (Bantu, JE13/14, Uganda). Relative clauses in this paper are categorized into nominal and clausal relatives on the basis of their exhibited morphosyntactic properties. The nominal relative clause category comprises elements which have been previously regarded as adjectives (Morris and Kirwan 1972; Taylor 1985) which include some color terms among other lexical items. The second category, namely clausal relatives, is subcategorized into subject and object clausal relatives. The subject clausal relative is realized within the subject nominal prefix by differential tone marking while the object clausal relative is an obligatory agreement-bearing complementizer which stands alone in agreement with the object antecedent. This paper describes the properties and use of the object relative marker as it has previously been regarded as a demonstrative or a pronoun. The paper offers an alternative position to the status of the object relative clause marker, proposing that it is not a pronoun equivalent to the English Wh-relative pronoun, and that it is not a demonstrative per se, but rather an agreement-bearing complementizer that heads a CP. The paper further asserts that the augment is not a relative clause marker as it is stated in Morris and Kirwan (1972) and Taylor (1985) but expresses a restrictive relative clause when present. As part of syntax, the paper discusses agreement properties in relative clause constructions and reports that a clausal relative takes the agreement of the head of the relative clause, but this is not always the case since anti-agreement cases are reported. Data for the analysis comes from authentic written materials and elicited constructions.

Interclausal relations in Papuan languages and in particular their prototyical clause chaining structures have long presented serious descriptive problems. These have been analyzed variously as instances of subordination, coordination, and even a third unique type of relationship, cosubordination. This paper argues that clause chaining structures are actually a type of coordination, but distinguished from familiar types of coordination by the type of constituent coordinated, S versus IP. The parametric variation found in clause chaining constructions across Papuan languages is in turn accounted for in terms of the types of functional heads of verbal inflections, negation, mood, tense, illocutionary force, which head the individual IPs conjoined in clause chains. This paper presents a revision of the theory of clause linkage, in particular the theory of nexus, first developed in Foley and Van Valin (1984) and restated in Van Valin and La Polla (1997) and Van Valin (2005). The original theory proposed three categories of nexus, the traditional ones of subordination and coordination and a new type, cosubordination. Subordination and coordination were distinguished along the traditional lines of embedded versus non-embedded. For our purposes here, we will define an embedded clause as one which functions as a constituent, either core or oblique (Andrews 2007; Foley 2007), of another clause, the main or matrix clause. Conventionally, grammarians have called embedded subordinate clauses which function as core arguments complements, and those which function as oblique constituents, adverbial clauses, but in our view this is not the most perspicacious terminology because it obscures their overall similarity, a similarity clearly brought out in the structure of many Papuan languages. For that reason, in this paper we will refer to both types simply as subordinate clauses and note the level of embedding, core versus oblique. Clauses linked in a coordinate nexus are not in an asymmetrical relationship of embedded versus matrix clause, but rather are joined at the same level, strung along rather like beads on a string. Designating a clause by the exocentric category S (Bresnan 2001), we can represent the contrast between subordinate and coordinate nexus as Figure 1:

Topics in Linguistics, 2020

This research is conducted qualitatively and aimed at patterning and describing clause and sentence structure in Lampung language through the configuration of its constituents. Regarding the constituents, Lampung has two types of clause: minor and major clauses. A minor clause is indicated by only one constituent, which is commonly a subject, predicate or adjunct. Regarding its function, it can be classified as vocative, shown by exclamation (Wuy!, Huy!); a greeting, as shown by an expression (tabikpun ngalam pukha); and an Arabic greeting (assalamualaikum). On the other hand, a major clause minimally consists of a subject and predicate, and apart from these there can also be an object, complement and adverbial. Furthermore, this research finds various categories that can act as predicative constituents: they are a verb/verbal phrase, adjective/adjective phrase, and noun/nominal phrase. Additionally, a copular verb (iyulah) and existential marker (wat) can also be the predicate. Thi...

Aguaruna is a Jivaroan language spoken in the Northern Peruvian Amazon. Clause-chaining is central to Aguaruna grammar; narratives are characterised by strings of dependent clauses which are marked to show grammatical and semantic relationships with an associated finite verb. There are also versatile nominalisations (cf. Noonan 1997) which are integrated into narrative structure in various ways. This paper describes the use of nominalisations in clause-combining in Aguaruna, showing how formally distinct clause types can function as a single, unified clause-chaining and reference-tracking system. Reference: Noonan, Michael 1997. ‘Versatile nominalizations.’ in Bybee, Haiman & Thompson (Eds.) Essays on Language Function and Language Type. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 373–394

Opción: Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, 2020

The aim of this research is to describe the adverbial clause marking strategy in Balinese. The data sources of this reasearch are narrative texts in weekly Balinese Newspaper, Bali Orti, and several short stories which are written in Balinese. Each semantic function has at least two different markers, one is for a low register and the other one for a high register. The result showed that adverbial clauses in Balinese can be classified into eleven semantic functions. Each of those semantic functions at least has two different markers for the same semantic function.

Our purpose in the present paper is to examine whether the relativized NP in yangrelative clauses in Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian (CJI) is or is not restricted to subjects. The data for the study were based on the database of the speech of children and adult-toadult speech in CJI, as well as the linguistic judgments of two native speakers of CJI. The results of our analysis showed that for adult and child speakers of CJI, object gap relativization and adjunct relativization are also possible, in addition to the preponderance of relative clauses involving subject gap relativization. We argued that children and adults employ essentially similar strategies in forming relative clauses. Children, however, differ from adults in two respects, that is (i) children relativize from object position to an even lesser degree than adults do and (ii) children relativize from adjunct position more freely than adults do. * This research was supported by the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology. We would like to thank David Gil, Uri Tadmor, and all the staff of the MPI Eva Jakarta Field Station for providing much of the data and for their helpful discussions of the patterns found. Thanks are also due to the NUSA reviewers, whose suggestions were very helpful in improving the paper. 1 Jakarta Indonesian is a regional dialect of Indonesian that is spoken on a daily basis in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia. It is used for inter-ethnic communication and increasingly also for intra-ethnic communication. It is also gaining currency as an informal lingua franca throughout urban areas in Indonesia. Jakarta Indonesian is distinct from Betawi Malay, the native dialect of the indigenous ethnic community of Jakarta. It is also distinct from Standard (and near-standard) Indonesian, varieties which are used in more formal contexts in Jakarta and throughout Indonesia. From the perspective of acquisition, Jakarta Indonesian is acquired naturally, automatically and completely by most or all children growing up in Jakarta. In contrast, Betawi Malay is acquired by at most a small minority of Jakarta children, alongside Jakarta Indonesian. Standard Indonesian is generally acquired by children at a later age via formal instruction in schools. 2 The data for this study are based on three sources: 1) the MPI Jakarta Indonesian Database (a large database of naturalistic data based on the speech of children (henceforth Child) and their caretakers

e-Journal of Linguistics, 2012

Serial verb construction (SVC) is a construction where more than one verbs occur in a clause without any overt markers of subordinator or coordinator. SVC is a common fenomenon in isolative languages which lack morphological markers for sintactic processes. However, in the use of Balinese, which is rich in morphological markers, SVC are common fenomena. This research attempts to analyse the typological characteristics of SVC in Balinese, to describe the types of SVC in Balinese viewed from the structure of events which forms the SVC, to analyse the constituent merging strategies in clauses containing SVC. This research applies decriptive-qualitative approach, by combining analitic and introspective methods. The data source of this research was 50 short story texts taken from Sastra slot in “Bali Orti”, weekly newspaper of Bali Post, completed with spoken texts, obtained by applying direct observation technique. The data was descriptively and analitically analysed by using the de...