A grammar of the Pendau language

Abstract

This dissertation is a basic description of Pendau, a previously undescribed Western Malayo-Polynesian language in the Tomini-Tolitoli group found in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. This description relies heavily on natural language data for its documentation. Most of the description covers concerns in the typological functional framework which also provides a means to organize the data. Chapter 1 gives a brief ethnographic background and introduces the linguistic context and background to Pendau. Very little had been known about Pendau until this current research. Chapter 2 describes the phonetics and the basic phonology of Pendau in essentially a structuralist framework. However it includes acoustic analyses of stress (non-phonemic pitch-accent with low to high tone), vowel formants, and the glottal stop (which is often manifested as creaky voice). Chapter 3 builds on chapter 2 by examining the phonology in a generative framework and looks at the phonological processes via lexical phonology. The most outstanding feature of phonology in Pendau is the extensive use of vowel harmony in many prefixes. Chapter 4 discusses the morphology of Pendau and the complicated stem forming morphology. At the morphological level I take a non-morphemic view and integrate a kind of word and paradigm approach in connection with lexical phonology and autosegmental phonology. Word classes are introduced in chapter 5, and chapter 6 introduces basic clausal syntax and includes a discussion of grammatical relations. Both of these chapters are fundamental to understanding the description in later parts of the dissertation. Chapter 7 discusses nominal phrases. Chapter 8 discusses prepositional and instrumental phrases. Chapter 9 describes the seven canonical verb classes and miscellaneous verb morphology. Chapter 10 describes transitivity altering operations which include causatives, applicatives, reciprocals, and a special equative construction. Chapter 11 describes directional verbs and their use as directional serial verbs. Chapter 12 describes the importance of voice and introduces the use of inverse voice which contrasts with the other transitive voice construction, active voice. Tense, aspect, and mode are described in chapter 13. Auxiliaries, adverbs, and negation are described in chapter 14. Chapter 15 describes clause combinations and complex sentences, and includes comparatives, complementation, quotation margin formulas, relative clauses, interclausal relators and propositional relations, and discourse connectors. Chapter 16 describes the use of imperatives and interrogatives. Finally, at the discourse level I integrate several discourse methods with the strongest emphases coming from Longacre and Givon. Chapter 17 describes some discourse features of cohesion and prominence. This includes fronting, leftdislocation, repetition, and topic continuity. In chapter 18 I follow Longacre's approach to discourse analysis and describe structures of different genres in Pendau. Three interlinearized texts are included in the appendices. The other appendices provide supporting data, figures, tables and charts.