Topics in the phonology and morphology of Wutung

Abstract

This thesis describes several aspects of the grammar of Wutung, a language spoken on the far north-west coast of Papua New Guinea, straddling the border with Indonesia. The thesis is divided into eight chapters falling broadly into two parts. The first part focuses primarily on phonology and phonetics, while the second details aspects of the verbal morphology, the structure of the clause and of the noun phrase. Chapter 1, the introduction, provides a general background to the people, their village and their language and includes a brief discussion of the sociolinguistic context. Chapter 2 provides a brief typological overview and summary of the thesis. Chapter 3 deals with the segmental phonology, laying out the segmental inventory and the basic phonemic and phonotactic organisation of the language, including a description of the nasal vowels and syllable structure. Chapter 4 discusses the segmental phonetics, dealing in particular with voice onset timing on obstruents and the acoustic realisation of the seven oral vowels. Chapter 5 focuses on the phonology and phonetics of tone. Tone is assigned to words, but manifests on syllables, its realisation depending on the number of syllables in the word and the location of an accent point. The phonetic analysis involves examination of the acoustics of the four tone melodies of Wutung. Chapter 6 provides an overview of the structure of the simple clause, summarises the behaviour of the various word classes and describes how the major elements of the clause are combined. This chapter functions to provide a context for the following two chapters. Chapter 7 deals with the noun phrase and its constituents, primarily the noun, pronouns, and various modifiers. It presents a description of the structure of the noun phrase, definitions of the classes of word that act as NP constituents, and a summary of their morphology. Chapter 8 describes the morphology of the verbal word. It focuses in particular on describing the complex person/number/gender agreement marking found on the verb. This agreement marking is complex, manifesting via fusion of agreement prefixes with the verb root and involves substantial suppletion, especially on transitive verbs. There are four appendices: the first presents a more detailed typological overview, based on the features from the World Atlas of Language Structures; appendix 2 is the phonetic analysis wordlist; the third appendix lists the Wutung words used in the thesis, with tone marking; the fourth contains two short Wutung texts.