Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis is a descriptive grammar of Barupu, the easternmost member of the Skou family of languages. Barupu is spoken by around 3000 people on the north eoast of New Guinea; its grammar has not previously been described. Barupu is a tone language in which words belong to one of five tone classes and it exemplifies a type of pitch-accent system where for the most part tone is attracted to penultimate stressed syllables and spreads one syllable to the right. Some words, however, have tones lexically specified to one of the final two syllables ofthe word. A key feature of Barupu grammar is that there is no oblique marking on NPs - no particles, adpositions or case markers provide information about a nominal's role in the clause. Instead, Barupu is head-marking. Underived verbs show multiple exponence of subject, which can take the form of double prefixing or prefixing and infixing. There is a set ofsuffixing morphemes that function like applicatives in adding participants to the clause, but which are very atypical in appearing outside verbal inflection and showing extra agreement for subject. Barupu also has a prefixing Benefactive paradigm that replaces regular subject agreement and can be extended to mark external possession. Finally, Barupu is a polysynthetic language and, as such, makes almost no use of f9rmal subordination. Appendices to this thesis include a set of interlinearised texts and a draft of a Barupu-English dictionary with an English-Barupu finderlist.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/283536 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Corris, Miriam |
| Publisher | University of Sydney., Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | The author retains copyright of this thesis., http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/copyright.html |
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