A grammar of Kéo : an Austronesian language of East Nusantara

Abstract

This dissertation is a grammatical description of the Austronesian language Keo. as spoken in the village of Udiworowatu in central Flores, eastern Indonesia. The language is unlike many previously described Austronesian languages became it is highly isolating. It has basic AVO/SV word order. Following an introduction to the language, its speakers and the area .in which it is spoken in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 describes the phonetics and phonology of Udiwotowatu Keo and Chapter 3 provides an overview of grammatical relations in Keo. Word classes are discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Two supercategories of open and closed word classes can be identified for Keo. Membership into the open classes of noun and verb presents some problems in Keo due to the multifunctional nature of many words. These Problems are discussed in Chapter 4 which also provides criteria for membership of the word classes of noun and verb and their respective subclasses. Chapter 5 examines the closed classes that can be distinguished. Chapter 6 describes the extremely minimal morphological processes that occerin Keo. There is a single clitic. Reduplication has been borrowed from Indonesian/Malay and there is some compounding. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 explore primarily nominal parts of the language. Chapter 7 describes noun phrases. Possessive constructions are described in Chapter 8. Keo has two distinct system for counting, one using base four and the Other using base ten. These are examined in Chapter 9 where the classifier system used with numerals is also described. Clause types are identified on the basis of transitivity, with ambient, intransitive, transitive and ditransitive clauses distinguished, Ellipsis of arguments within clauses is very common in Keo and is discussed alongside clause types in Chapter 10. The variety of serial verb constructions found in Keo are described in Chapter 11. In Chapter 12 predicate modification is described. Topics covered include aspect and mood, reciprocals and reflexives and negation. The spatial orientation of referents and participants within discourse is highly salient in Keo. Prepositions, directionals and demonstratives all contribute to this, and they are described in Chapter 13. In Chapter 14 clause combining techniques are described. There are two primary ways .to join independent clauses: simple juxtaposition, and the use of conjunctions. There are two types of embedded clauses: complement clauses and relative clauses. Interrogative imperative constructions are described in Chapter 15. There are five appendices. Appendix A is a list of the texts that have been used in the preparation of this description. Appendix B provides a discussion of speech genres. Appendix C presents sample texts from several genres. The final two appendices are word lists Appendix D contains word lists giving equivalents in a number of different Keo dialects, while the Appendix E lists all the words used in the corpus. Show more