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A Sketch Grammar of Matéq: A Land Dayak Language of West Kalimantan, Indonesia

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/8912
Date January 2013
CreatorsConnell, Timothy M.
PublisherUniversity of Canterbury. School of Social and Political Sciences
Source SetsUniversity of Canterbury
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic thesis or dissertation, Text
RightsCopyright Timothy M. Connell, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml
RelationNZCU

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