LINGUIST List 10.1439

Sun Oct 3 1999

Review: Donohue: Grammar of Tukang Besi

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  • klamerm, review: Donohue: Grammar of Tukang Besi

    Message 1: review: Donohue: Grammar of Tukang Besi

     Date: Mon, 20 Sep 99 12:06:55 MET
    From: klamerm <klamermlet.vu.nl>
    Subject: review: Donohue: Grammar of Tukang Besi


    Mark Donohue, 1999, A Grammar of Tukang Besi [Mouton Grammar Library 20], Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 576 p.

    Reviewed by Marian Klamer, General Linguistics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Leiden University, The Netherlands.

    Tukang Besi is an Austronesian (Western Malayo-Polynesian) language, spoken by approx. 80.000 speakers in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. The language is spoken on a small archipelago with the same name, located in the Banda and Flores Sea and consisting of the four islands Wanci, Kaledupa, Tomea, and Binongko. Tukang Besi is an exonym from Malay 'tukang besi' "blacksmith": the wares of the blacksmiths of the poorest island of the four, Binongko, are known as far afield as Ujung Pandang in South Sulawesi, and the blacksmiths of Binongko are credited with secret powers that enables them to pull glowing iron from the hearth without thongs, and to beat metal into machetes with their hands if necessary.

    "A Grammar of Tukang Besi" is the first comprehensive grammar of the language. It is based on primary data gathered by the author in cooperation with several native speakers during field work in the area. Apart from a 475-page description of the structural aspects of the language, the book also contains 40 pages of glossed and translated texts, a word list of about 1000 items (Tukang Besi - English / English - Tukang Besi) and a small index.

    SYNOPSIS

    Chapter 1 presents information on the setting and region of Tukang Besi, on the language's dialects, the attitudes of its speakers, and the sources for the study. The grammar is based on Donohue's own fieldwork, the majority of which took place 'between 1992 and 1995', in 'the village of Patuno on the north coast of Wanci, and also a fair deal of time around Kota Wanci on the west coast.' The language helpers were from 'a wide cross-section of the Tukang Besi speaking community'. I take this to imply that the grammar is based on data that are not skewed towards the idiolect of one informant, and that the dialect described is (one of the) Wanci dialect(s) (in chapter 2 it is explicitly stated that it describes the phonology and morphophonology of the Wanci dialect).

    The structure of Tukang Besi is described working upwards from the segmental to the sentential level in chapter 2 to 20. Rather than summing up the content of these chapters, in what follows I will highlight some aspects of TB that may be of interest to typologists and/or theoreticians.

    The Tukang Besi (henceforth TB) consonant set includes two implosive stops /b, d/, and a set of prenasalised segments, including voiced and unvoiced stops /mp, mp, nt, nd, nk, ngg/, /ns/ and a loan affricate /ndz/. There are several morpho-phonological processes involving nasals: -um- infixation to realise irrealis mood; prefixation of hoN-, where the nasal substitutes the root initial consonant, taking over its place features; and in root/foot reduplication, an initial voiceless stop is prenasalised: notinti 'he is running' > notinti-ntinti 'he's running around madly' .

    The major constituents of a TB clause are the verb phrase and the case phrase (an NP governed by a case marker). In a verbal clause, word order is verb-initial. The subject is marked by a prefix on the verb, the object by a verbal enclitic. Nominal constituents are optional if the referential identity of the arguments they express has already been established. If a clause contains NPs, the order is V O A, but this order is not fixed.

    TB is a Philippine-type language like e.g. Tagalog, in the sense that it is unlike languages with predominantly accusative or ergative syntax: each clause must morphologically select one of the arguments of the transitive verb as its pivot, and there is no unmarked choice. The selected argument is assigned a specific case, regardless of whether it is in A, S, or O syntactic role. In Philippine studies, this argument has traditionally been referred to as the 'focus', 'subject' or 'topic'. As these terms carry other associations as well, Donohue uses the term 'nominative' to refer to the case assigned to it, which is expressed by the article na. The other core article te assigns non-nominative case. Transitive verbs with subject and object markers assign nominative case (na) to the O syntactic role and non-nominative case to A; schematically: s-V-o [na O] [te A]. Intransitive verbs assign nominative case to their single argument S: s-V [na S]. Interestingly, if a transitive verb is not crossreferenced for its object, the case assignment is reversed: s-V [te O] [na A]. Also, the word order is now rigidly [VO]A.

    The author analyses this pattern as a Phillipine-type voice system, with a restricted range of categories -- only two. In TB the diachronic shift towards head-marking pronominal indexing has proceeded to quite an extent, but at the same time the overt Phillipine-type case system has been preserved, and its verbal cues reinterpreted as being those involving the presence versus absence of the object agreement. A TB verb phrase contains the verb and either a bound pronominal object or an object case phrase (KP), but not both. The arguments that may be indexed on underived verbs are limited to Agent, Dative, Instrument or Theme/Patients. Verbal indexing is only available for so-called 'core arguments'. Core arguments are obligatorily marked by the case-marking articles na (nominative) or te (non-nominative), while oblique arguments may drop the oblique article i. Only core arguments may launch floating quantifiers or adverbs (chapters 7 and 20), may be relativised (chapter 15), and may be marked on the verbs of subordinate clauses such as nominalisations (chapter 12) and relativisations.

    Nominal constituents are discussed in chapter 5 (pronouns), 6 (demonstratives), 12 (noun phrases: core and oblique), 13 (possession and possessive constructions), 15 (relative clauses), and 18 (conjoining). A TB noun phrase is head initial. Pronominal possessor marking appears on the head noun if the NP is nominative [Nom [[N-Poss] Adj]], while in non-nominative NPs, the possessor is marked on the nominal modifier [non-Nom [[N Adj] -Poss]]. An NP preceded by an article (which functions as the case marker) is nested within a case phrase, KP. Both NPs and KPs may be prepositional complements.

    Tukang Besi has two major open word classes: nouns and verbs. Nouns characteristically appear inside NPs, are preceded by an article, a preposition or a numeral classifier. Verbs are the class of words that can be prefixed for subject when used as the head of a main clause. Adjectives are a subclass of the non-agentive intransitive verbs. The category of adverbs is not discussed in the chapter on word classes, but from the information given elsewhere in the book, it seems to be a separate category which shares some properties with the verbal class.

    In TB the same word form may be used, with no derivational morphology, in both nominal and verbal frames. In fact, such 'pre-categorial' items constitute the majority of the lexical items in the open word classes. This phenomenon, which is very common in Austronesian languages, has important implications for formal theories that take the lexical categories N and V as fundamentally different. It also raises analytical questions, such as how to account for the surface homophony between finite forms and nominalised forms in (especially) the Eastern Austronesian languages.

    In Tukang Besi there is much more verbal morphology than there is nominal morphology. In the valency-increasing category there are three causative prefixes and three applicative markers (chapters 9 and 10), and valency-decrease is accomplished by three passive-like prefixes, two reciprocal prefixes, and various other prefixes (chapter 11). Object incorporation also features in the language as a valency decreasing device, and two varieties of possessor ascension conspire to complicate the picture of valency and grammatical relations (chapters 7 and 20). Serial verb constructions (chapter 8) are used to express adverbial notions, as well as aspect and modality.

    CRITICAL EVALUATION

    This is an excellent grammar, but I do have a couple of comments. One flaw of the book is that the fieldwork and the database on which it is based have not been documented. Obviously, a grammar based on, say, 3 months of fieldwork and a 3-hour spoken text corpus is much less reliable than one based on 18 months of fieldwork and a corpus of 15 hours. >From this grammar, it is not clear how much time the author spend in the field 'between 1992 and 1995', where he spent it, with whom he worked, and for how long. With respect to his data base, the author states that most materials used in the grammar have been taken from recordings of traditional stories, process descriptions, and recordings of conversations of various speakers, but again the exact data are missing: how many hours of texts were recorded and transcribed, and who were the speakers? Another flaw is that it is not made explicit that Lexical Functional Grammar is used as the major descriptive tool. Especially for readers that are not familiar with LFG it would have been helpful if the book contained a brief introductory section, explaining the major differences between generative and declarative phrase structure (the latter of which is used in this grammar), and the formal notations of e.g. argument structure and valency-changing morphology.

    Nevertheless, A grammar of Tukang Besi is an exemplary reference grammar. The author has a thorough knowledge of Tukang Besi, and shares this by coupling acute analyses of the data with coherent presentations. The illustrative material provided in the text is generally well-chosen: apart from clarifying the analysis, in many cases it is sufficiently rich to leave the reader something to discover on his/her own. I am confident that this grammar will prove to be highly valuable in the testing of hypotheses of linguistic theory on e.g. argument marking and valency-changing morphology, to the further development of descriptive (Austronesian) linguistics, and to linguistic typology in general.

    Marian Klamer is a fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, currently affiliated to the Departments of Linguistics of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and Leiden University, in The Netherlands. She has published various articles and a grammar of the Eastern Indonesian language Kambera (1998, A grammar of Kambera, Mouton de Gruyter), as well as articles on the related languages Leti, Buru, and Tukang Besi. Her research interest is language contact and change in Eastern Indonesian languages, with particular focus on the interface lexicon-morphosyntax.