Date: 20-May-2005 From: Sanderien de Jong <s.de.jonglet.leidenuniv.nl> Subject: Focus in Manado Malay: Stoel
Title: Focus in Manado Malay
Subtitle: Grammar, particles, and intonation
Published: 2005
Publisher: CNWS Publications
www.cnwspublications.com
Author: Ruben Bastiaan Stoel
Paperback: ISBN: 9057891018 Pages: 282 Price: Europe EURO 23.00
Abstract:
Manado Malay is the language of the Indonesian city of Manado. This book presents an overview of the grammar of this language, with particular attention to discourse particles and intonation, and studies how these phenomena are used to mark focus.
The first part of the book gives a description of the grammar, based on a corpus of spontaneous conversations. It presents the main aspects of the phonology, morphology, and syntax. One chapter is devoted to discourse particles, which are used frequently in this language. Another chapter discusses intonation, a much neglected topic in the study of Indonesian languages.
The second part of the book is concerned with information structure. It presents a number of experiments that were run to test the compatibility of various constituent orders and focus structures. Other experiments were carried out to investigate which discourse particles mark focus and to define the position of the sentence accent for a given focus structure.
This book will be of interest to linguists working on information structure or intonation, as well as to typologists and students of Indonesian languages.
Ruben Stoel studied Austronesian linguistics at Leiden University. He has traveled widely through South-East Asia and studied many languages. During a prolonged stay in Manado he gathered the information required for the current study. He is currently employed by the University of Potsdam.
Linguistic Field(s):
Discourse Analysis
Language Description
Morphology
Phonology
Syntax
Typology
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