A grammar of Dela: an Austronesian language of Rote, eastern Indonesia

Abstract

This thesis is a grammatical description of Dela (ISO 639-3:row), an Austronesian language of western Rote, eastern Indonesia, spoken by approximately 11,000 native speakers. The grammar describes and discusses issues from the phonology of the language to its discourse structure. Dela is a predominantly head-marking language with mostly prepositional SV/AVO typology and preposed possessors. Grammatical relations are determined by linear word order, co-indexing and behavioural properties. Dela is a nominative-accusative language. Thus, S/A are identical, as opposed to O/P. The Dela phoneme inventory consists of five basic vowels and 16 consonant phonemes, including two implosives and three prenasalised plosives. Stress consistently falls on the penultimate syllable of the roots. Like many Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia, Dela has a preference for disyllabic roots with the form CVCV. Consonant clusters are only found after antepenultimate vowel deletion, and codas are highly restricted. Since word-final consonant clusters are prohibited, consonant-initial suffixes or enclitics often replace the final consonant of stems. Phonetically, long vowels are analysed as sequences of like VV, with each vowel being the head of a syllable nucleus. There are no single unit diphthongs in Dela. Like several other languages in Timor, words that are semantically adjectives in Indo-European languages have the morphosyntactic properties in Dela of either verbs or nouns, or both verbs and nouns. Pronouns are marked for person, number and clusivity, and only some pronouns have forms that distinguish case. Dela has a rich and complex morphology. Thus, morphologically complex words are common, formed through combinations of multiple affixes plus other word-formation processes, such as compounding or reduplication. The classical distinction between derivational and inflectional morphology is not always clear-cut for Dela. Subject marking is a notable feature of verbal morphology in Dela, and inflected verbs can occur as bases for other verbal or nominal derivational processes. A small number of verbs are found to have double subject marking. Typologically, Dela is a predominantly left-headed language, and, as expected, shows mostly post-head modifiers in the NP. The only pre-head modifiers are a pre-head quantifier and the preposed possessors. While Dela has six constructions that express possession, the preposed general possession and genitive constructions are the most common. Preposed possessors are also a common typological feature of Austronesian languages in eastern Indonesia and out into the Pacific, but rare to the west. Dela lacks an alienable and inalienable distinction as a noun class system, a distinction found in some languages in the region. The genitive and possessive constructions in Dela do not map onto clear semantic distinctions. Verb phrases also have pre-head and post-head modifiers. Dela is an aspect-prominent language. Clauses are mainly negated by a bipartite negator that embraces the negated element. Structurally, apart from the bipartite negator, which is marked with both pre-predicate and clause-final elements, the other negators occur in pre-predicate or clause-initial positions. Complex events are expressed by coordinated clauses, either through syndetic (overt connector) or asyndetic (no connector) strategies. Serial verb constructions are used extensively in Dela to express a variety of clause combinations and semantic functions, such as purpose, motion, direction, aspect and manner. Dela uses a variety of complementisers for verbs of speech, perception and cognition, and for purpose and result clauses. Tail-head linkage and poetic parallelisms are common structures in Dela discourse. In direct speech, quote formula always precedes the quote content.