The Begak (Ida'an) language of Sabah

540 Pages·2005·6.454 MB·English

by  Nelleke Elisabeth Goudswaard.

The Begak (Ida’an) Language of Sabah
Published by
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3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected]
The Netherlands http://wwwlot.let.uu.nl/
Cover illustration: Shelter in a rice field.
ISBN 90-76864-73-X
NUR 632
Copyright © 2005: Nelleke Goudswaard. All rights reserved.
VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT
The Begak (Ida’an) Language of Sabah
ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT
ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan
de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
op gezag van de rector magnificus
prof.dr. T. Sminia,
in het openbaar te verdedigen
ten overstaan van de promotiecommissie
van de faculteit der Letteren
op vrijdag 3 juni 2005 om 13.45 uur
in de aula van de universiteit,
De Boelelaan 1105
door
Nelleke Elisabeth Goudswaard
geboren te Terneuzen
promotor: prof.dr. G.E. Booij
copromotor: dr. M.A.F. Klamer
Acknowledgements
The research of this book has been financed by the Netherlands Organisation for
Scientific Research (NWO), whose grant (GW-350-70-001) is hereby gratefully
acknowledged. I am grateful to the Economic Planning Unit of the Malaysian
government for letting me conduct research in Sabah. I thank my Malaysian
counterpart, the Sabah Muzium, for supporting this project.
I want to express my gratitude towards my promotor Geert Booij and my
copromotor Marian Klamer for their faith in me and their support throughout the
years. Shortly after I graduated, they wrote the research proposal and applied for the
grant, thereby making it possible for me to work on this project. In later stages Geert
Booij proved to be a quick and careful reader. Marian Klamer received a position at
the University of Leiden soon after I started my research at the VU, but despite her
own busy life including field work periods, she was always willing to answer my
questions. Her comments on my work were always very sharp and thorough.
During my field work in Ulu Tungku I stayed in the house of Pius Paulus
and Payna Bibos and their four children. They and their parents, who live next door,
really made me feel at home and accepted me as a member of their family.
Megsukur aku nong muyun ngod ka kito bay jadi peteray.
During my first fieldwork trip, Patrucia Pius and Kamisah Bibos
transcribed large portions of recorded speech, while Lina Tiris and Rosnani Bessing
helped me with the translation. During my second and third fieldwork trip, Payna
Bibos and Aitim Apan were my consultants. Their patience with the sometimes long
and tedious work of transcription, their enthousiasm for the work and their
friendship made it very pleasant to work with them.
I thank all the people of Tungku for their hospitality and friendship. Many
people contributed to this book by telling me a story, a recipe, or allowing me to
record their conversation. I have good memories of the volleyball matches and of the
days we went fishing or looking for clams in the river together.
In Kota Kinabalu, the people of the Summer Institute of Linguistics assisted
me in many ways. I am grateful to Dave and Marsha Moody, who first invited me to
work on Begak. They shared their preliminary notes and some transcribed texts with
me for initial language learning and helped me with several administrative details.
My special thanks are for Jong-Dae and Mi-Suk Lee, who graciously welcomed me
into their house in Tungku on so many occasions, assisted me as a newcomer to the
village and generously shared their corpus of recorded speech with me. I have good
memories of the long rides to and from the village with their children. Alberta
Stoaling let me stay in her appartment during the periods I was in Kota Kinabalu.
Anna Leena Saikonen solved my computer problems on many occasions. Louis
Rose made the detailed map of the Tungku area. I am grateful to all the members
who kept me company climbing the hill, and on several holiday trips.
I am grateful to Lora Daukin, who has performed the long and tedious task
of typing the transcriptions of the recorded speech. I am grateful to Reinoud
Veenhof for making the maps of South-East Asia and Borneo.
I want to thank the members of the reading committee: Sander Adelaar,
Aone van Engelenhoven, Paul Kroeger and Lourens de Vries for reading through the
vi
manuscript. I especially want to thank Paul Kroeger and Sander Adelaar for their
thorough and valuable comments, which greatly improved the quality of this book.
In Amsterdam, I shared my office first with Onno Huber en Mirjam
Ernustus. When Mirjam left the VU we kept in touch and made many pleasant
walking trips together. I am grateful for Mirjam’s help with the statistics of this
book. A year later I shared my office with Corrien Blom and Lidewij van Gils, and
later I moved to the office of Mieke Koenen, Gerard Boter and Nynke Vos. They
made our office into a pleasant place to work. I thank the PhD-students and post-
docs of the department for the conversations and the fun during the lunch break.
One of my collegues I want to mention separately is Wilco van den Heuvel.
We followed several courses together as undergraduate students. Later on we both
developed an interest in language description and both decided to write a
dissertation on an Austronesian language. For many years we worked together,
learned from each other and shared our experiences of field work. Wilco read
through and commented on most of the chapters of the manuscript.
I thank my family for their love and support throughout the years.
Contents
Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................v
Tables and schemes..................................................................................................xv
Abbreviations..........................................................................................................xvii
Maps......................................................................................................................xviii
1 Introduction.........................................................................................................1
1.1. The language...............................................................................................1
1.1.1. The dialects Ida’an, Begak and Subpan..............................................1
1.1.2. Affiliation............................................................................................2
1.1.3. Typology.............................................................................................4
1.1.4. Differences between Ida’an and Begak...............................................5
1.1.5. Earlier research...................................................................................7
1.1.6. Literature in Ida’an and Begak............................................................7
1.2. Fieldwork, consultants, methodology.........................................................7
1.2.1. The field methods adopted..................................................................7
1.2.2. Consultants..........................................................................................8
1.2.3. The corpus...........................................................................................9
1.3. Language and culture................................................................................10
1.3.1. Setting of the Ida’an and Begak people............................................10
1.3.2. The use of the Begak language.........................................................12
1.3.3. Language, religion and culture..........................................................13
1.3.4. Uni lepid ‘layered language’.............................................................15
1.3.5. Kinship terms and terms of address..................................................16
1.4. Overview of the Begak grammar..............................................................17
2. Phonology.........................................................................................................19
2.1. Introduction...............................................................................................19
2.2. Phoneme inventory...................................................................................19
2.2.1. Consonants........................................................................................19
2.2.2. Vowels..............................................................................................22
2.2.3. Ida’an and Begak orthography..........................................................25
2.3. Phonotaxis.................................................................................................26
2.3.1. Syllable structure..............................................................................26
2.3.2. Consonant clusters............................................................................26
2.3.3. Initial clusters and geminates............................................................28
2.3.4. Word-final consonants......................................................................30
2.3.5. Vowel clusters...................................................................................31
2.3.6. The minimal word.............................................................................33
2.3.7. Phonotactics of non-content words...................................................34
2.3.8. Stress.................................................................................................35
2.3.9. Distribution of vowels.......................................................................35
2.4. Morphophonology....................................................................................36
2.4.1. Verbal class prefixes subcategorised for initial consonants of the stem
..........................................................................................................36
2.4.2. Nasal fusion......................................................................................37
2.4.3. Schwa elision....................................................................................42
2.4.4. Consonant deletion............................................................................43
viii CONTENTS
2.4.5. Infixation allomorphy of the Completive Aspect and Dependent
affixes ..........................................................................................................45
2.4.6. Reciprocal suppletive allomorphy: -(cid:0) r- infixation versus C -
(cid:1)
reduplication.....................................................................................................50
2.5. Reduplication............................................................................................51
2.5.1. C -reduplication...............................................................................52
(cid:1)
2.5.2. Foot reduplication.............................................................................53
2.5.3. Full reduplication..............................................................................55
2.5.4. Repetition with tu ‘too, also’ as a linker ...........................................56
2.5.5. Other reduplicated words..................................................................58
2.6. Post-lexical processes...............................................................................58
2.6.1. Shortening of inflected verbs............................................................58
2.6.2. /s/ becomes /h/ at the end of a word..................................................58
2.7. Summary...................................................................................................59
3. Morphological notions and categories..............................................................61
3.1. Introduction...............................................................................................61
3.2. Definitions of morphological notions.......................................................61
3.2.1. Root...................................................................................................61
3.2.2. Stem..................................................................................................61
3.2.3. Affix..................................................................................................64
3.2.4. Word.................................................................................................65
3.3. Affix slots.................................................................................................67
3.4. Morphological typology............................................................................69
3.5. Morphological verbal classes....................................................................69
3.6. The distinction between inflection and derivation....................................73
3.7. Summary...................................................................................................76
4. Parts of Speech.................................................................................................77
4.1. Introduction...............................................................................................77
4.2. Verbs.........................................................................................................77
4.2.1. Dynamic verbs..................................................................................78
4.2.2. Stative verbs and adjectives..............................................................79
4.3. Nouns........................................................................................................88
4.3.1. Common nouns.................................................................................88
4.3.2. Roots of dynamic verbs: nouns.........................................................89
4.4. Prepositions and locative nouns................................................................90
4.4.1. Prepositions.......................................................................................90
4.4.2. Locative nouns..................................................................................92
4.5. Pronouns...................................................................................................94
4.5.1. Personal Pronouns.............................................................................94
4.5.2. Interrogatives....................................................................................94
4.5.3. Demonstratives.................................................................................95
4.6. Quantifiers................................................................................................99
4.6.1. Numerals...........................................................................................99
4.6.2. Numeral classifiers..........................................................................101
4.6.3. Measure nouns................................................................................103
4.6.4. Other quantifiers.............................................................................104
ix CONTENTS
4.6.5. Days and months.............................................................................106
4.7. Adverbs...................................................................................................106
4.8. Aspectuals...............................................................................................107
4.9. Auxiliaries...............................................................................................108
4.10. Negators..............................................................................................109
4.11. Discourse markers...............................................................................109
4.12. Conjunctions.......................................................................................110
4.12.1. Conjunctions (also) used to link NPs..............................................110
4.12.2. Coordinating conjunctions..............................................................111
4.12.3. Subordinating conjunctions.............................................................112
4.13. Summary.............................................................................................113
5. Syntactic categories and the basic clause........................................................115
5.1. Introduction.............................................................................................115
5.2. Definitions..............................................................................................115
5.2.1. Subject and object...........................................................................115
5.2.2. Subject tests....................................................................................116
5.2.3. Terms, oblique arguments and adjuncts..........................................120
5.2.4. Voice...............................................................................................122
5.3. Verbal clauses.........................................................................................125
5.3.1. Word order and voice system..........................................................125
5.3.2. Word order and the case of pronouns.............................................127
5.3.3. Word order and pronouns in special constructions.........................131
5.3.4. The oblique preposition nong: human objects................................136
5.3.5. The word order of adjuncts.............................................................140
5.3.6. Conclusion......................................................................................141
5.4. Clauses with a subjectless predicate.......................................................142
5.5. Existential predicates..............................................................................143
5.6. Other non-verbal predicates....................................................................144
5.6.1. Nominal predicates.........................................................................144
5.6.2. Locative predicates.........................................................................145
5.6.3. Numeral predicates.........................................................................146
5.6.4. Comparatives..................................................................................146
5.7. Questions................................................................................................147
5.7.1. Closed questions.............................................................................147
5.7.2. Open questions................................................................................148
5.8. Imperatives..............................................................................................148
5.9. Summary.................................................................................................149
6. Verbal inflection.............................................................................................151
6.1. Introduction.............................................................................................151
6.1.1. Paradigm and organisation of this chapter......................................151
6.1.2. The link between voice, aspect and mood for transitive verbs........152
6.2. The Actor Voice class prefixes...............................................................155
6.2.1. The prefixes g -, b g- and m ng-...................................................155
(cid:2) (cid:2) (cid:2)
6.2.2. The derivational use of the Actor Voice class prefixes...................158
6.2.3. Summary.........................................................................................164
6.3. The Undergoer Voice Incompletive........................................................164
x CONTENTS
6.3.1. Unaffixed root.................................................................................165
6.3.2. The prefix p-...................................................................................168
6.3.3. The middle prefix b-.......................................................................168
6.3.4. Verbs prefixed with a combination of the AV-prefix g - and p- or b-
(cid:3)
........................................................................................................177
6.3.5. Summary.........................................................................................178
6.4. Completive Aspect..................................................................................179
6.4.1. The AV-Completive Aspect............................................................179
6.4.2. The UV-Completive........................................................................181
6.4.3. The Completive infix -i- in combination with the prefixes p- and b-...
........................................................................................................184
6.4.4. Verbs with UV-Completive Aspect morphology derived from nouns
or stative verbs................................................................................................185
6.4.5. Summary.........................................................................................186
6.5. The Dependent........................................................................................186
6.5.1. Dependent inflection on intransitive verbs.....................................187
6.5.2. The Dependent in imperatives........................................................188
6.5.3. The Dependent in successive actions..............................................189
6.5.4. The Dependent after auxiliaries......................................................190
6.5.5. The derivational use of the Dependent............................................193
6.5.6. Summary.........................................................................................194
6.6. Non-volitive Mood.................................................................................194
6.6.1. AV-Non-volitive verbs with k( )-...................................................195
(cid:3)
6.6.2. UV-Non-volitive verbs with a-.......................................................196
6.6.3. The variant ak -..............................................................................199
(cid:3)
6.7. The inflection of intransitive verbs.........................................................201
6.7.1. The unaccusative split.....................................................................201
6.7.2. Non-volitive Mood morphology on intransitive verb.....................204
6.8. Irregular verbs.........................................................................................209
6.8.1. Verbs that are unaffixed in the Actor Voice...................................209
6.8.2. Verbs with suppletive forms...........................................................209
6.8.3. Double infixation in complex stems...............................................210
6.9. Summary.................................................................................................212
7. Derivational morphology................................................................................213
7.1. Introduction.............................................................................................213
7.2. Reciprocals.............................................................................................213
7.2.1. Reciprocals derived from transitive stems......................................214
7.2.2. Reciprocals derived from intransitive verbs....................................221
7.2.3. Other semantic functions of the reciprocal.....................................223
7.2.4. Summary.........................................................................................229
7.3. Causatives...............................................................................................230
7.3.1. Causatives of intransitive verbs......................................................230
7.3.2. Causatives of transitive verbs.........................................................236
7.3.3. Summary.........................................................................................239
7.4. Petitives...................................................................................................240
7.5. Combination of the Actor Voice prefixes b -g -...................................244
(cid:3) (cid:3)