The thesis concerns Serudung Murut, a language of the Southwest Sabah subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Outside of a wordlist in Lobel (2016), virtually no published material on...Show moreThe thesis concerns Serudung Murut, a language of the Southwest Sabah subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Outside of a wordlist in Lobel (2016), virtually no published material on Serudung Murut exists. Data for this thesis comes from three main sources: two corpuses of language material collected in the periods of 1988-1991 and 2013-2016 by SIL researcher Jack Rushing, and one corpus of language material collected by the author for the author's Fieldwork (Internship) module in the period of January 16 to February 17, 2017. The bulk of language material comes from the variety of Serudung Murut spoken in the village of Serudung Laut in the western-most corner of Tawau Division, Sabah, Malaysia. Serudung Murut displays full lexical reduplication (mugad "travel" > mugad-mugad "wander about"), full root reduplication (gadingan "elephant" > gading-gadingan "lots of elephants"), and partial reduplication (bariu "wind" > babariu "windy"). Reduplication may occur with a stem from any word class, and may either alter the word class or the semantics of the stem, or both. Sometimes, a word which displays reduplication is amorphous, as with certain animal names and body parts: kakapir "praying mantis", sisigon "stingless bee", susuap "kneecap", bibingo "ankle". The thesis frames an analysis of reduplication in Serudung Murut according to a recent model devised by Jackendoff & Audring (to appear), called Relational Morphology. Relational Morphology is an offshoot of the Parallel Architecture (Jackendoff, 2002), a linguistic model which proposes that Phonology, Semantics and Syntax are independent linguistic components and are active simultaneously in speech production and parsing. Relational Morphology generalizes patterns between words in a lexicon and represents them as schemas. Therefore, a description of Serudung Murut reduplication according to this framework must posit generalized schemas which capture not only the structural variation, between full and partial reduplication, but also the variation in semantic effects.Show less
