Western Lamaholot: a cross-dialectal grammar sketch

This thesis is a cross-dialectal grammar-sketch of the Western dialect group of Lamaholot, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. It is a synthesis of the author’s own fieldwork data with the existing literature on the various dialects that belong to this group. Western Lamaholot has a little over 20 distinct phonemes, a strong tendency towards CV-syllables, and penultimate stress. It has SV and AVP word order but frequently shows fronting of non-focused elements. It makes use of serial verbs and a lot of the function words that are used are grammaticallized serial verbs. Nouns show a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession in possessive constructions. Some verbs are inflected for person and number through prefixes, and intransitive verbs sometimes get subject agreement suffixes. Adjectives, pronouns, and in some dialects demonstratives and numerals get a suffix -n, historically derived from genitive markers, when they are used as noun modifiers. This...Show moreThis thesis is a cross-dialectal grammar-sketch of the Western dialect group of Lamaholot, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. It is a synthesis of the author’s own fieldwork data with the existing literature on the various dialects that belong to this group. Western Lamaholot has a little over 20 distinct phonemes, a strong tendency towards CV-syllables, and penultimate stress. It has SV and AVP word order but frequently shows fronting of non-focused elements. It makes use of serial verbs and a lot of the function words that are used are grammaticallized serial verbs. Nouns show a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession in possessive constructions. Some verbs are inflected for person and number through prefixes, and intransitive verbs sometimes get subject agreement suffixes. Adjectives, pronouns, and in some dialects demonstratives and numerals get a suffix -n, historically derived from genitive markers, when they are used as noun modifiers. This thesis discusses controversial topics in the Lamaholot literature such as the phonemic status of long vowels, the existence of adjectives as a separate class from verbs, and the exact function of -n. It also lists elements that vary between dialects such as object marking on verbs, word-final consonants, and possessive constructions.Show less

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Western Lamaholot: a cross-dialectal grammar sketch