A grammar of Awtuw

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to describe the structure of the Awtuw language, spoken by about 400 people in the southern foothills of the Torricelli Mountains of northwestern Papua New Guinea. A brief preface presents my theoretical assumptions and methodological orientation. Language is viewed as a cultural phenomenon which, while by no means discrete from other facets of culture, has a distinct central focus that may be described independently without severe distortion. Grammatical classes and categories are isolated on the basis of language-internal morphosyntactic criteria and correlated with semantic functions. The introductory chapter places Awtuw in its geographical, cultural, and linguistic context, identifies the three dialects of Awtuw, and discusses the ubiquitous phenomenon of multilingualism in the Awtuw-speaking and surrounding area. Chapter 2 presents a brief description of Awtuw's phonemes and formalizes the major morphophonological processes. Awtuw has eleven phonemic consonants and seven vowels isolated on the basis of minimal pairs. Morphophonemic rules simplify geminates and certain other consonant clusters, elide vowels, assimilate nasals to following stops, and insert epenthetic vowels. There are also a number of vowel harmony rules that assimilate affix vowels to stem vowels. Chapters 3 through 6 present an analysis of various morphosyntactic phenomena. Chapter 3 devises a number of formal identifying criteria which are used as binary features to analyze Awtuw's parts-of-speech classes. Chapter 4 describes the structure of the verb complex and the categories represented by verbal affixes, and presents a feature-based analysis of the Tense, Mood, and Aspect system. Chapter 5 begins with a discussion of grammatical relations, classifies verb roots on the basis of the case frames that they occur in, and correlates these classes with inherent aspect and other semantic categories. Chapter 6 describes the case-marking suffixes and their functions. Chapters 7 through 10 focus on aspects of Awtuw syntactic structure. Chapter 7 describes the structure of the Noun Phrase. Chapter 8 presents a classification of verbless predication types. Chapter 9 discusses a variety of operations on the clause, including question-formation, negation, reflexivization, and focusing of constituents. And Chapter 10 analyzes interpredicate and interclausal relations. It includes discussion of various types of verb serialization, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, conditionals, and coordinate constructions. Chapter 11 begins with an analysis of Awtuw kinship terminology and goes on to discuss color terminology, numeration and measurement, body part terminology, and the terms for major biological classes. Finally, Chapter 12 presents a brief description of a variety of paralinguistic phenomena.