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Description:
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This book describes a grammar (mainly morphology and syntax) of the
Lewoingu dialect of Lamaholot, an Austronesian language
(Central-Malayo-Polynesian subgroup) spoken by 150,000 ~ 200,000 people on
the eastern tip of Flores and the surrounding area in eastern Indonesia.
Lamaholot has 35 dialects, and although there are some descriptions and
dictionaries for other dialects, the Lewoingu dialect has never been
described before. The description in this book is basically theory-neutral,
and analyses are kept to a minimum. This work will be of interest to
descriptive linguists and Austronesian specialists, in particular because
languages of eastern Indonesia in general are poorly documented and
relations of several dialects of Lamaholot are poorly understood.
Typologists and theoretical linguists would be interested in unique
agreement in Lamaholot, where agreement emerges not only on verbs and
adjectives, but also on adverbs, numerals, a preposition, and even on the
conjunction ('and'). Theoreticians will also be interested in the chapter
on resumptive pronouns, which is a rare description of the phenomena in
Austronesian languages and shows that Lamaholot basically shares general
properties of resumptive pronouns found in Irish and Semitic languages.
Also of interest are possessive constructions, where the possessor can be
either pronominal or postnominal, and each other has peculiar constraints.
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