Work Papers
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Volume 50 (2010)Volume editor: Joan Baart |
| URL: http://www.und.edu/dept/linguistics/wp/2010.htm | |
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These papers require Adobe® Acrobat® Reader version 4.0 or higher. |
| Send questions or comments by email to the attention of the "Workpapers editor" . | |
Syntactic Underspecification in Riau Indonesian(15 pages, 291 Kb) |
Indonesian is known for having a relatively simple morphological and syntactic structure. This is especially true of local varieties of the language, where contrast between categories found in Standard Indonesian is neutralized. In the Indonesian variety spoken in Riau Province, there is almost no morphological marking of grammatical categories and there is relatively free word order. Gil (1994, 2003, 2005b) develops a theory of Riau Indonesian grammar that has only one open grammatical category, which he calls S (Sentence). This means that there are no distinctions between categories like noun, verb, and adjective and no basic word order. In this paper I show that Gil's analysis does not adequately account for generalizations in Riau Indonesian syntax. I argue that Riau Indonesian has the basic lexical categories of noun, verb and adjective. Based on these lexical categories, I show that the language has basic SVO word order. I argue that Riau Indonesian can be better analyzed in terms of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG; cf. Van Valin & La Polla 1997, Van Valin 2005) since RRG accounts for generalizations in Riau Indonesian more adequately. I also use Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp & Reyle 1993, Asher 1999) to show how discourse structure can function to aid semantic interpretation of Riau Indonesian syntax in an RRG framework. |
Round vowel and dorsal consonant epenthesis in Seri(13 pages, 1,138 Kb) |
Recent work on markedness has claimed that round vowels and dorsal consonants are never epenthesized. However, Seri seems to present exactly these types of epenthesis. Relevant data are presented and discussed, and it is claimed that these rules are valid counterexamples that need to be taken into consideration more seriously. |
Prenasalization and trilled release of two consonants in Nias(13 pages, 1,525 Kb) |
This paper presents an acoustic study of the phonetic realization of two consonants in Nias (Indonesia), orthographically represented as mb and ndr. These consonants have been analyzed by Catford (1988) and Brown (2001, 2005) as a bilabial trill and an apical trill, respectively. My own cross-dialectal observations indicate that these consonants have multiple realizations in each dialect. This paper presents evidence for four broad phonetic realizations of both mb and ndr: most commonly a plain stop, but also a prenasalized stop, a stop with trilled release, and stop with fricated release. It seems that the variable character of the two phonemes is the only consistent feature that distinguishes them from the regular stops in the same places of articulation, and from the regular alveolar trill. |
Isthmus Zapotec vowel formants(17 pages, 3,413 Kb) |
This paper addresses several questions regarding the acoustic properties of Isthmus Zapotec vowels. Based on earlier recordings of a female, mother-tongue speaker of the language, average formant frequencies for each of the five phonemic vowels are determined for this speaker. I then look at differences in formant frequencies between stressed and unstressed modal vowels. Finally, I compare modal, laryngealized and checked productions of the vowels, to see if there are systematic differences between these three phonation types. |
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