Klamer A Grammar of Teiwa

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-3-11-022607-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 49, 558 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 240 mm

Reihe: Mouton Grammar Library [MGL]ISSN

Teiwa is a non-Austronesian ('Papuan') language spoken on the island of Pantar, in eastern Indonesia, located just north of Timor island. It has approx. 4,000 speakers and is highly endangered. While the non-Austronesian languages of the Alor-Pantar archipelago are clearly related to each other, as indicated by the many apparent cognates and the very similar pronominal paradigms found across the group, their genetic relationship to other Papuan languages remains controversial. Located some 1,000 km from their putative Papuan neighbors on the New Guinea mainland, the Alor-Pantar languages are the most distant westerly Papuan outliers. A grammar of Teiwa presents a grammatical description of one of these 'outlier' languages.

The book is structured as a reference grammar: after a general introduction on the language, it speakers and the linguistic situation on Alor and Pantar, the grammar builds up from a description of the language's phonology and word classes to its larger grammatical constituents and their mutual relations: nominal phrases, serial verb constructions, clauses, clause combinations, and information structure. While many Papuan languages are morphologically complex, Teiwa is almost analytic: it has only one paradigm of object marking prefixes, and one verbal suffix marking realis status. Other typologically interesting features of the language include: (i) the presence of uvular fricatives and stops, which is atypical for languages of eastern Indonesia; (ii) the absence of trivalent verbs: transitive verbs select a single (animate or inanimate) object, while the additional participant is expressed with a separate predicate; and (iii) the absence of morpho-syntactically encoded embedded clauses. A grammar of Teiwa is based on primary field data, collected by the author in 2003-2007. A selection of glossed and translated Teiwa texts of various genres and word lists (Teiwa-English / English-Teiwa) are included.

Zielgruppe

Typologists, Linguists interested in Papuan Languages, Linguists

Autoren/Hrsg.

Klamer, Marian

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Fremdsprachenerwerb und -didaktik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Acknowledgements;6
2;Table of contents;10
3;Abbreviations;18
4;Chapter 1. Introduction;20
5;Chapter 2. Phonology;56
6;Chapter 3. Word classes;86
7;Chapter 4. Grammatical relations;182
8;Chapter 5. The Noun Phrase;206
9;Chapter 6. Non-verbal clauses;240
10;Chapter 7. Verbal clauses: The marking of Reality status, Modality and Aspect;264
11;Chapter 8. Negative, interrogative, and imperative clauses;292
12;Chapter 9. Serial verb constructions;322
13;Chapter 10. Clause combinations;380
14;Chapter 11. Information structure;416
15;Appendix I. Texts;444
16;Appendix II. Word lists;470
17;Notes;530
18;References;544
19;Index;554

Leseproben

11.0. Introduction

This chapter presents a sketch of some aspects of Teiwa ‘information packaging’ (Chafe 1976) or ‘information structure’ (Lambrecht 1994). The information structure of a sentence is the formal expression of the pragmatic structuring of a proposition in a discourse (Lambrecht 1994:5). That is, in discourse, speakers can assume that there is information about already mentioned events and participants common to both them and their addressees, but other information which is not. The structuring of sentences along these parameters is called ‘information structure’ (cf. Foley 2007: 403).

Crosslinguistically, information structure can be formally manifested in different ways: in aspects of prosodic structure such as focus stress; in special grammatical markers for topic or focus; in the form of nominal constituents and the ordering of such constituents in the sentence; in the form of complex grammatical constructions such as passives or antipassives; and in certain choices between related lexical items. A selection of these formal manifestations of information structure are found in Teiwa and discussed in this chapter. Here, I focus on those aspects of Teiwa information structure that I found most striking when I was examining and analysing the texts in my corpus. Note that the formal domain of information structure is the clause or sentence, so that the organisation of Teiwa discourse will not be discussed here.

The chapter is structured as follows. In section 11.1, I address the question how discourse participants are introduced in Teiwa texts. In section 11.2, I describe how constituents get contrastive or identificational focus by placing them in alternative positions in the clause, and by using long rather than short pronouns. In section 11.3, I describe the formal and functional characteristics of focus expressions marked with the focus marker la. La follows the phrase it governs and typically marks new information focus. While focused constituents are new information, just being introduced into the discourse, topics are closely related with given or old information. Section 11.4 describes the topic marker ta, which functions to encode topic discontinuity by announcing a new topic or reintroducing one that was introduced previously. In section 11.5, I briefly indicate the discourse function of two demonstratives that are frequently used in texts: i, which marks a forthcoming topic, and waal ‘the one mentioned’, which refers to participants that have been introduced before.

11.1. The introduction of discourse participants

New discourse participants are nominal constituents (NPs) that occur with various modifiers, including nuk ‘one’, which marks indefinite NPs (Ch. 5, section 5.5.1), and u ‘Distal’, which marks definite NPs (Ch. 3, section 3.6.1). New discourse participants are introduced into the discourse by their own separate predicate: a verb of motion, posture, a deictic verb, or the existential verb pas ‘be exactly’. After they have been introduced, the now given/known participants are referred to by short pronouns, or are not expressed at all, which results in zero anaphora across clauses.

Über Autor(innen)

Marian Klamer, Leiden University, The Netherlands.