Matéq is an Austronesian language of the Land Dayak (Bidayuhic) subgroup spoken by around 10,000–20,000 people in West Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia. This thesis presents a sketch grammar of the language based on linguistic fieldwork conducted from September 2012 to January 2013. Topics discussed in the sketch grammar include the geographic and social context of the Matéq language, its phonology and elements of its morphosyntax. Major features of Matéq phonology include the presence of both plain and prenasalised plosives, geminate nasals, and nasal vowels that contrast with oral vowels in certain positions. In terms of morphosyntax, this study shows that Matéq has two sets of personal pronouns which encode information about the generational relationships between speech participants or referents. With respect to grammatical voice, findings suggest that Matéq has five distinct voice constructions which can be distinguished on the basis of their morphosyntactic and semantic properties. Each voice construction also tends to have different pragmatic and TAM associations. This study also shows that Matéq has optional subject marking with certain verbs, and has both continuous and discontinuous serial verb constructions.

Northern Mao is an endangered Afroasiatic-Omotic language of western Ethiopia with fewer than 5,000 speakers. This study is a comprehensive grammar of the language, written from a functional/typological perspective which embraces historical change as an explanation for synchronic structure. The grammar introduces the Northern Mao people, aspects of their culture and history, and the major aspects of the language: contrastive phonology, tone phenomena, nouns, pronouns, demonstratives, numerals, noun phrases, verbs and verbal morphology, single verb constructions, non-final/medial clauses, subordinate clauses and alignment. The tone system has three contrastive levels, where the Mid tones subdivide into two classes which historically derive from two different sources. Nouns each exhibit two tonal melodies: one melody in citation form or other unmodified environments and another melody when syntactically modified. Extensive coverage is given to developments in the pronominal and subject-marking systems as well as the verbal system. In the pronominal and subject marking systems, innovations include the development of a dual opposition, the fusion of an affirmative verbal prefix to subject prefixes, and the development of these subject prefixes into new pronouns. In the verbal system, innovations include the development of new verbal wordforms from subordinate + final verb periphrastic constructions and a set of new subject markers from an old subordinator morpheme. The verbal system is oriented around two oppositional relations: realis vs. irrealis and finite vs. infinitive verb forms. Realis and irrealis verbs have distinct item-arrangement patterns: realis verbs take subject prefixes while irrealis verbs take subject suffixes. Realis is associated with affirmative polarity and non-future tense and may be used with many aspectual distinctions. Irrealis is associated with negative polarity, future tense, and counterfactual constructions; irrealis verbs do not express many aspectual distinctions. Finite versus infinitive verb stems are differentiated by tone. Finite verb stems are used in affirmative declarative and interrogative utterances, non-final/medial constructions and the more finite subordinate clause structures. Infinitive verb stems are used in negative declarative and interrogative utterances, non-final/medial constructions and the less finite subordinate clause structures. The work concludes with a summary of cross-constructional alignment patterns and evaluates the efficacy of a marked-nominative analysis.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第20639号 / 人博第828号 / 新制||人||198(附属図書館) / 29||人博||828(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)教授 谷口 一美, 教授 齋藤 治之, 教授 壇辻 正剛, 教授 山梨 正明 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

This thesis is a description of some aspects of the grammar of Sɛlɛɛ, a Ghana-Togo-Mountain (GTM) language, based on my own fieldwork. The thesis consists of an introduction and five papers. Paper (I), Noun classes in Sεlεε, describes the noun class system of Sɛlɛɛ. It consists of eight noun class prefixes, four marking singular and four plural. They are paired in irregular ways to form eight genders (singular-plural pairs). Nouns agree with determiners, numerals and interrogative qualifiers within the noun phrase and can be indexed on the predicate. Nouns are allocated to classes/genders based partly on semantic notions. Paper (II), Sεlεε (with Francesca Di Garbo), details the morphological encoding of diminution in Sɛlɛɛ either by the suffixes -bi, -bii, -mii, -e or -nyi alone or in combination with noun class shift. Augmentation is not expressed morphologically. Paper (III), The tense and aspect system of Sεlεε: A preliminary analysis, shows that Sɛlɛɛ, unlike most Kwa languages, has a rather elaborate tense system encompassing present, hodiernal, pre-hodiernal and future tenses. The aspectual categories are progressive, habitual and perfect. Both categories often amalgamate with first person singular subject clitics. Paper (IV), Standard negation in Sεlεε, deals with the negation of declarative verbal main clauses. This is primarily encoded by a high tone, sometimes combined with segmental morphemes, portmanteau negative tense-aspect morphemes and vowel lengthening. Each tense-aspect category has at least one particular negation strategy. Paper (V), Unravelling temperature terms in Sεlεε (with Francesca Di Garbo), investigates the grammatical constructions employed for temperature evaluations. Personal feeling is only encoded via subjects, while ambient and tactile evaluations are construed attributively and predicatively. A comparison of Selee and other GTM languages revealed similar noun morphologies but very different verbal morphologies. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Unpublished book chapter. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: In press. Paper 5: Unpublished book chapter.</p>

This dissertation aims to provide a grammatical description of Dameli (ISO-639-3: dml), an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 5 000 people in the Domel Valley in Chitral in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in the North-West of Pakistan. Dameli is a left-branching SOV language with considerable morphological complexity, particularly in the verb, and a complicated system of argument marking. The phonology is relatively rich, with 31 consonant and 16 vowel phonemes. This is the first extensive study of this language. The analysis presented here is based on original data collected primarily between 2003-2008 in cooperation with speakers of the language in Peshawar and Chitral, including the Domel Valley. The core of the data consists of recorded texts and word lists, but questionnaires and paradigms of word forms have also been used. The main emphasis is on describing the features of the language as they appear in texts and other material, rather than on conforming them to any theory, but the analysis is informed by functional analysis and linguistic typology, hypotheses on diachronical developments and comparisons with neighbouring and related languages. The description is divided into sections describing phonology, morphology and syntax, with chapters on a range of individual subjects such as particular word classes and phrase types, phonological and syntactical phenomena. This is not intended to be an exhaustive reference grammar; some topics are only touched upon briefly while others are treated in more detail and suggestions for further research are given at various points throughout the work.

This thesis describes the features of the phonology, morphology and syntax of Oksapmin, a Papuan (Non-Austronesian) language of Papua New Guinea. Oksapmin is spoken by around 8000 people, most of whom reside in the Tekin valley in Sandaun Province. The analysis in this thesis is based on the study of data from both elicitation and text collection undertaken on two field trips between 2004 and 2006: from May to October 2004, and from October 2005 to January 2006. / A general introduction is provided in Chapter 1, phonology, phonotactics and morphophonology are discussed in Chapter 2, word classes in Chapter 3, demonstratives in Chapter 4, nouns in Chapter 5, postpositions in Chapter 6, noun phrase syntax in Chapter 7, verbs in Chapter 8, coverbs in Chapter 9, clausal syntax in Chapter 10, phrasal clitics in Chapter 11, and clause combining in Chapter 12. Four sample texts are provided as appendices. Sound files are provided on the accompanying CD for many of the examples scattered throughout the thesis, as well as for all the texts in the appendices. / The most interesting and important grammatical subsystem in Oksapmin is the evidential one, which permeates various areas of the grammar. Without proper knowledge of this system, one cannot make a single grammatical sentence in the language. Recall that evidentiality is, roughly speaking, when a speaker marks how he or she came about the knowledge on which a given utterance is based. Evidentiality in Oksapmin is indicated with past tense verbal inflection, with enclitics, and with a number of other constructions. The evidential system is typologically unusual in that the primary contrast it marks is participatory/factual versus visual/sensory evidence; this distinction is made in the verbal inflection. Participatory/factual evidentials are not widely attested cross-linguistically, and those systems that do exist have been largely ignored in the typological literature. / Some of the other areas of grammar discussed in this thesis include prenasalised consonants with nasal allophones, noun phrases with a complex syntactic structure, a range of demonstratives which distinguish for elevation, a large vocabulary of kin terms including a set of dyadic kin terms, extensive use of complex predicates consisting of a light verb plus a coverb, and a variety of clause combining strategies including clause chaining.

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