EDITORS: Lander, Yury A.; Ogloblin, Alexander K. TITLE: Language and Text in the Austronesian World SUBTITLE: Studies in Honour of Ülo Sirk SERIES: LINCOM Studies in Austronesian Linguistics 06 PUBLISHER: Lincom Europa YEAR: 2008
Malcolm Ross, Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University
SUMMARY This book is a collection of papers written in honor of the Estonian linguist Dr Ülo Sirk. It is divided into three parts, titled respectively Diachrony, Synchrony and Text Studies. It is prefaced by a short paper by the editors ''On Ülo Sirk and his work'' (1–4) and a bibliography of Sirk's works (4-7). Sirk's academic interests form a set of concentric circles. In the center is Bugis language and literature (Bugis is spoken in south Sulawesi). Sirk has produced two grammars of literary Bugis, one in 1975, and the second in 1996 after he was first able to visit Sulawesi. His interest in the languages of Indonesia forms a somewhat larger circle, with work on Indonesian, on the grammar of western Indonesian languages, on the typology of eastern Indonesian languages, and on the historical phonology of the languages of Ambon. The largest circle of all is the comparative and historical linguistics of the Austronesian language family. reflected in a number of publications and, the bibliography tells us, a forthcoming historical-comparative introduction to the Austronesian language family written in Russian.
The twenty papers in the volume reflect these interests. Two concern Bugis literature and five more have to do with Sulawesi languages. Of the other thirteen nine are concerned with Indonesia, one with Malagasy, one with Philippine languages and two with reconstructing the history of the Austronesian family.
Below I provide a short summary of the contents of each paper, in most cases followed by an evaluation. At the end, I provide a short evaluation of the book as a whole.
Part 1. Diachrony. In ''On the classifiability of Malayic'' (pp 11-22) Alexander Adelaar provides a survey of the evidence concerning the internal subgrouping of the Malayic family, which includes the many varieties of Malay as well as a number of languages located in Sumatra and Kalimantan. The paper is a critique of a 2004 paper in which the author of this review proposed that Malayic has two branches: (what Adelaar calls) the Kanayatn subgroup and a group containing all other Malayic varieties. I also suggested that inscriptional Old Malay did not belong to Malayic proper. Adelaar presents evidence that both these claims are wrong, as the features which I claimed to be Kanayatn innovations are largely retentions from an earlier interstage which are also reflected in various other Malay varieties and in Old Malay.
Adelaar's paper substantially updates the discussion of Malayic subgrouping in Adelaar (1992) and complements his 2004 paper on the history of the movements of Malayic speakers. His criticism of Ross (2004) is entirely justified. The latter was written in the mid-1990s, when there was frustratingly little activity in the historical linguistics of western Indo-Malaysia, but publication of the volume in which it appeared was delayed until 2004. It was a mistake on my part to let it be published, and its only virtue is that it has sparked Adelaar's detailed and lucid update, which goes some way towards clearing muddied waters. An important implication of Adelaar's paper is that there remains a great deal of work to be done on the history of the Malayic languages (and for that matter of many of the languages of western Indo-Malaysia).
Sergey Kullanda, ''Old Javanese Kinship Terminology: Some Historical-Typological Implications'' (pp22-30), lists the terms for consanguineal kin that are found in Old Javanese texts, observes that they are a formal set in that they are all prefixed with /ra-/, and examines their usage, in particular their extended senses, to draw a conclusion about Old Javanese social structure. This conclusion, which depends to some extent on comparisons with other (not Austronesian speaking) societies, are that Old Javanese society was viewed by its members in terms of stratification by age. Both men and women were divided into senior and junior groups on the basis of whether or not their children had passed through initiation. Uninitiated children in their turn were referred to without a gender distinction. Kullanda takes this conclusion as an argument for the hypothesis that classificatory and individual kinship patterns are derived from this stratification, rather than vice versa.
Kullanda does Austronesianists the favor of presenting Old Javanese kin terms together in one place and surveying their usage in texts. A number of steps in his arguments seem less than fully justified, however. Comparative arguments based on other societies do not sit well with the reconstructive practices of historical linguists, and his proposal that classificatory systems are derived from a system of social stratification, rather than vice versa, is scarcely supported by Austronesian kinship data. Cognates of the Old Javanese terms appear in classificatory systems in many societies that lack the kind of stratification Kullanda describes for Old Javanese. In this respect Old Javanese is the exception rather than the rule. I was also troubled by Kullanda's apparent assumption that Old Javanese immediately reflects Proto Austronesian. On the widely accepted theory that Proto Austronesian was spoken in Taiwan, Old Javanese appears many nodes below it in the family tree. Furthermore, it was spoken by a society that had undergone a major transformation under Indic influence.
In his paper ''In Search of Middle Javanese'' (pp31-45) Alexander K. Ogloblin asks whether the term 'Middle Javanese' denotes a language that is distinct from Old and Modern Javanese. He concludes tentatively that it does but that the boundary between Middle and Modern Javanese is fuzzy. As a rule of thumb Ogloblin applies the term Middle Javanese to works written between the 14th and the late 17th century, equating the rise of Modern Javanese with the appearance of Islamic and Arabic influence on texts. He uses a corpus of texts from Old, (allegedly) Middle and Modern Javanese to determine the frequency of certain phonological and morphological features in the three literary languages and to decide whether there is a distinct feature set that characterizes Middle Javanese. It is difficult to arrive at a definitive answer because the various texts and text genres display significant differences in frequencies, reflecting the fact that writers have consciously modeled their styles on more archaic forms.
Ogloblin's quest for Middle Javanese is interesting, as it highlights the fact that the languages of the texts are literary languages and that more recent writers have often sought to imitate earlier styles. Because of this, the Old, Middle and Modern Javanese periods overlap, with texts written in the language of one period appearing at the same time as texts written in the previous one. This not only makes the task of distinguishing between the stages (and especially between Middle and Modern) difficult, but it also makes the paper rather difficult to follow for the reader who has no knowledge of Javanese literature. One thing is clear, however: the historical linguist who goes to Javanese texts hoping to quickly find out something about the development of spoken Javanese will be disappointed, as the relationship between dialects of the spoken language and the various forms of the written language must have been very complex indeed.
Andrew Pawley's ''Where and When Was Proto Oceanic Spoken? Linguistic and Archaeological Evidence'' (pp47-71) is one of the longer papers in the volume and answers the question in the title. Proto Oceanic was the ancestor of the large subgroup of 500 or more Austronesian languages spoken in Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia, i.e. in most of the islands of the Pacific from New Guinea eastward. Pawley provides an up-to-date and quite detailed summary of the current state of Oceanic studies. Linguistic matters he discusses include the position of Oceanic in the Austronesian family tree, the boundary between Oceanic and non-Oceanic Austronesian languages, the shared innovations which are evidence for the Oceanic subgroup, and previous attempts to place the Proto Oceanic homeland based on the internal subgrouping of Oceanic. Archaeological issues include the equation of Proto Oceanic with the languages of the Lapita culture, the emergence of the Lapita culture in the Bismarck Archipelago (to the east and north of New Guinea) and its eastward spread to the Reefs/Santa Cruz Group, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, and the preference of Lapita communities for small offshore islands. The archaeological evidence places the break-up of Proto Oceanic sometime between 3400 and 3100 years ago. Pawley suggests that this was preceded by a Pre-Oceanic period of 2-3 centuries during which speakers were located somewhere in the islands along the north coast of New Guinea, through which they must have traveled to reach the Bismarcks, or in the Bismarcks themselves, where the break-up of Proto Oceanic occurred.
I must confess a personal interest in Pawley's paper, as I had a hand in various ways in the discussions that led up to its writing, and it cites various publications of mine, some of which provide evidence or arguments that feed into Pawley's findings with regard to the Oceanic homeland and one of which he nicely dissects. I find his conclusions the best account of the evidence that I have encountered, and his dissection thus fully justified. One problem which he solves well is the question of the origins of Western Oceanic languages (spoken on the margins of mainland New Guinea, on New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville and the northwest Solomons). Pawley proposes that since the archaeology implies that Proto Oceanic was spoken on small offshore islands, the Western Oceanic languages reflect the gradual spread of Oceanic speakers, after the break-up of Proto Oceanic, onto the larger islands just listed. His scenario neatly solves the problem of how the Western Oceanic linkage arose, which I had previously attributed to a post-Proto Oceanic dispersal of Western Oceanic dialects that led to the extinction of earlier Oceanic dialects.
Ilia Peiros's short paper ''Malayic, Chamic and Aceh: Some Lexicostatistical Remarks'' (73-88) is followed by an appendix (78-87) containing the lexicostatistical data on which his lexicostatistical analysis is based. The paper is both a defense of the Russian school of lexicostatistics and a critique of the classical comparative method of subgrouping by shared innovations. Peiros sets out his view of the family tree as a representation of relationships within a family tree. A tree, he says, is built from two kinds of relation, between ancestor and descendant and between sisters. Both are based on similarity, but sister relations exclude similarities that are due to contact. An objective method of measuring similarities provides the basis for ''an automatic procedure of genetic classification''. This method is lexicostatistics. Peiros objects to the use of shared innovations on the grounds that shared innovations are an insufficient reason for establishing a node (and thus an interstage language) in a tree, as they may be the outcome of contact. Instead, an interstage language must be reconstructed on the basis of shared similarities in the modern languages (more on this under ''Evaluation'' below). Finally, Peiros uses a lexicostatistical analysis to propose that Aceh is more closely related to the Malayic subgroup (cf Adelaar's paper above) than to the Chamic subgroup to which it is usually assigned.
Peiros' defence of lexicostatistics and his critique of the comparative method of shared innovations is so brief and programmatic that I am not quite certain that I have understood it correctly. His insistence, however, that relatedness should be based on inherited similarities turns the comparative method on its head, and I am hard put to understand how, for example, the raft of innovations which characterize the Oceanic subfamily of Austronesian (see Pawley's paper) can be attributed to contact and dismissed as a basis for subgrouping and as a starting point for the reconstruction of Proto Oceanic (which of course is also based on shared similarities of widely distributed daughter languages). I am also unable to understand how lexicostatistics can be regarded as the recognition of shared inherited similarities: Peiros offers no response to the standard criticism that lexicostatistics fails to distinguish between innovation and retention, presumably because he considers retentions, not innovations, to have probative value. He offers his lexicostatistical analysis of the relationships of Acehnese to Malayic and Chamic with no comment on the reasons that others have advanced for subgrouping Acehnese with Chamic or on Sidwell's (2005, 2006) recent publications on this matter.
In ''Notes on the Historical Phonology and Classification of Wolio'' (89-113) René van den Berg investigates the history of Wolio, spoken on the island of Buton southeast of Sulawesi. The author describes the social history of Wolio and cites published research which shows that Wolio does not belong to the Muna-Buton group, which occupies the rest of Buton. He suggests that instead it belongs to the Kaili-Pamona group, one of the microgroups of Sulawesi proper. His main grounds for this are the Wolio reflexes of Proto Malayo- Polynesian phonemes, and in the course of presenting these he also provides a fairly full overview of Wolio historical phonology. The paper concludes with a very brief look at other features that may suggest a Kaili-Pamona origin for Wolio and with notes on the interaction of Wolio and Muna-Buton languages.
Van den Berg's paper requires little comment other than to say that it is a very workmanlike survey of Wolio historical phonology and a fine contribution to the growing literature on Sulawesi linguistic history. It is hard to fault the author's conclusion that Wolio is a Kaili-Pamona language, and I look forward to seeing answers to some of the questions mentioned towards the end of the paper.
John U. Wolff's ''The Reconstruction of the Proto-Austronesian Phoneme *g'' (115-128) is one of a series of papers the author has published at intervals since 1974 (Wolff 1974, 1988, 1991, 1997) presenting his ongoing analysis of the Proto Austronesian phoneme system. I write ''ongoing'', since his 1982 paper denied the existence of *g. The reconstruction of Proto Austronesian has its roots in the work of Dyen in a series of papers beginning in the late 1940s (e.g. Dyen 1953) and of Dahl (1973), and has since bifurcated into the analyses of Blust (refining Dahl and Dyen) and Wolff (a radical break with previous analyses). Wolff's *g corresponds to initial *g and medial and final *j as reconstructed by his predecessors and by Blust. According to Wolff, *g- and *-j- are complementary and so he treats them as a single phoneme. Wolff first discusses, then rejects, Sagart's recent (2004) suggestion that *j was a palatal nasal. He presents the reflexes of (his) *g in a sample of Austronesian languages and discusses the puzzle whereby *g- is reflected as /k-/ in the vast majority, concluding that this change must already have occurred in some dialects of Proto Austronesian. The reflexes of *-g- and *-g are many and varied. Few languages retain /g/, and /d/, /z/ or a liquid are far more common. Whatever the phonetics of *-g-/*-g, Wolff concludes that it must have undergone change independently on many occasions.
Wolff's reconstruction of Proto Austronesian *g is hard to evaluate, as a proper evaluation would have to consider the reconstruction of the whole system of phonemes to which *g belongs, and this reconstruction is as yet unpublished, although Wolff provides us with an inventory. The observation that *g-, *-j- and *-j are in largely complementary distribution was made by the writer of this review in 1992. The point made there, however, was that their complementarity dated back to a pre-Proto Austronesian date and was imperfect in Proto Austronesian itself. Wolff appears to overlook this observation. Wolff is right, though, that the modern reflexes of his *g are puzzling. But his suggestion that ''some of the dialects which became MP [Malayo- Polynesian] languages still retained the contrast [between *g and *k] and others had lost it'' is odd, as it says that Proto Malayo- Polynesian was not a unitary language: I am not sure how he would then account for the phonological innovations which are usually considered to have occurred in a unitary Proto Malayo-Polynesian ancestral to all Austronesian languages spoken outside Taiwan. I do agree with him that the medial and final reflexes of his *g (others' *j) are something of a riddle.
Part 2. Synchrony In their ''Word Order of Prepositional Phrases in Aralle-Tabulahan and Moronene'' (131-140) T. David Andersen & Robin McKenzie present data supporting a curious construction in member languages of two Sulawesi microgroups. The languages are Aralle-Tabulahan and Moronene, and the construction is one in which the object of a locative preposition is modified by a demonstrative. In both languages the demonstrative *precedes* the preposition, giving the sequence 'that in house', i.e. the constituent 'that house' is discontinuous.
Andersen & McKenzie's analysis of 'that in house' is curious in that it offers no discussion of the origins of this constituent-breaking construction. Their own data offer a possible source. Aralle-Tabulahan locative and directional phrases must begin with a locative or directional word. This is apparently the head of the phrase, and the following (omissible) prepositional phrase is apparently its dependent. Such constructions occur in both Austronesian and Papuan languages of Maluku (Holton 2003) and the Bird's Head (Dol 2004) (and in southern New Ireland: see Mosel 1982 on Tolai), and it seems possible that the 'that in house' construction reflects a reanalysis of the locative head as a deictic modifying the noun governed by the preposition.
Two papers, one by Mikhail A. Chlenov and Svetlana F. Chlenova, the other by the second author, describe Damar Batumerah (West Damar), a previously undescribed language from a small rather isolated island in southwest Maluku. The first, ''The Damar Batumerah (West Damar Language) of South-Eastern Indonesia'' (141-162) is a wordlist of 513 entries with a two-page introduction locating the language and pointing out that although West Damar is typologically similar to its neighbors, members of the SW Maluku subgroup, its reflexes of Proto Austronesian phonemes show that it does not belong to this subgroup. Chlenova's ''Preliminary Grammatical Notes on Damar Batumerah or West Damar, a Language of Southwest Maluku'' (163-177) is a 9-page sketch with a 5-page appendix of additional examples.
These two papers on Damar Batumerah offer the briefest account of the language but for their brevity are remarkably rich in data. Given that the languages of Maluku are only now receiving detailed attention and that their history is still little understood, these papers are a welcome addition to the literature and fill one more gap in our knowledge.
Mark Donohue's ''Obligatory Incorporation and ''Have'' in Tukang Besi'' (179-197) is both a description of a feature of this SE Sulawesi language (supplementing his 1999 grammar) and a typological excursion. Donohue shows that the Tukang Besi 'have' construction entails noun (more strictly, N') incorporation and is a counterexample to Mithun's (1984) generalization that languages which have noun incorporation will also have an alternative non-incorporating (transitive) construction. It is, however, as Donohue observes, a counterexample only if we take it that every noun-incorporating verb in a language will also occur in the non-incorporating construction. Tukang Besi itself has both an incorporating and a non-incorporating construction, but the verb 'have' is exceptional in not allowing the non-incorporating construction. Donohue associates this with the fact that 'have' is the only bivalent stative verb in the language.
Donohue's paper is a fine addition to the literature on Tukang Besi. One matter which the author does not comment on is that across languages 'have' clauses often entail a construction that is found nowhere else in the language or, if 'have' is a verb, this verb differs in its constructional behaviour from the other verbs of the language. The Tukang Besi verb 'have' is just such a case. Unfortunately the chapter is marred by a number of editorial glitches. Footnote numbering starts at 20 instead of at 1. Italics are missing from some vernacular morphemes (bottom of p180). In the phonetic transcription of (2) [na] occurs instead of [te]. In (51) 'stone' occurs where 'knife' is expected.
Barbara and Timothy Friberg have worked on Konjo (a language of the South Sulawesi group) for many years, and their paper on ''/-ka/, a Marginalized Grammatical Morpheme in Konjo'' (199-207) is one of those mopping up exercises that occurs when one has described the major structures of the language but is inevitably left with a collection of oddments that fall outside one's core description. In order to clear the way for an account of this /-ka/, the authors list and briefly describe some (near-)homophones. They then list the occurrences of enclitic /-ka/, which is attached obligatorily to some roots, optionally to others. Words of which it is an obligatory part mean 'but regrettably', 'or' and 'lest'. Words to which it is optionally attached include the meanings 'anyway', 'possibly', 'but' and 'perhaps'. The Fribergs suggest that it has an aspectual function, which they equate with contingency or possibility.
One wonders whether the Fribergs' goal of pinning down the function of the Konjo enclitic /-ka/ is achievable. Of the eight uses they list, three are obligatory, i.e. the combination of the root + /-ka/ has become fully lexicalized and /-ka/ has become part of the word in which it occurs. Of the five optional uses, some also show signs of lexicalization in that the root + /-ka/ combination has a distribution and function all of its own. This paper is an excellent example of fine-grained description, but I suspect that any general conclusion about the function of /-ka/ must be a conclusion about its meaning in the past ('contrary to expectation'?) rather than in the present. The characterization of 'possibility' as aspectual, incidentally, seems odd. Its meaning falls under the rubric of mood rather than of aspect.
In ''Functions of the Mori Bawah Indefinite Particle /ba/: Towards a Comparative Study'' (209–232) David Mead examines uses of this particle and shows that its uses include adverbial subordination (condition, recurrent contingency, reason, purpose), conjunction ('or'), reactivated topic ('as for'), preceding the wh-word in a question to give senses such as 'whatever?' or 'what ... anyway?', an element in an indefinite quantifier construction, a complementiser, and a deferential request marker. Mead also examines the uses of forms in related Sulawesi languages and concludes that its original meaning was 'perhaps, maybe' and that other uses reflect grammaticisation.
Mead's paper is an interesting comparative study. I agree entirely with the conclusion that studies using careful definitions are essential to accurate reconstructions of morphosyntax and its functions. However, I was a little taken aback by some of the terminological choices in this paper. /ba/ is described in the title as an 'indefinite particle'. Definiteness is conventionally associated with noun phrases, but the uses of /ba/ have to do with the speaker's certainty about a predication. 'Discourse connective' is used where 'subordinating conjunction' would seem more appropriate. I am left with the impression that Mead wishes to remain agnostic on matters that entail syntactic analysis.
Bernd Nothofer's ''E-mel sebagai bahan pengajaran'' (233-242), written in Standard Indonesian, lists and exemplifies the major characteristics of emails written in that language. These include phatic particles and phrases, interjections, topicalisations, the use of non-standard elements (e.g. absence of verbal prefixes), and code-switching between Indonesian and a regional language, the choice of language often depending on the subject matter. Indonesian is used when talking about technological, academic and religious issues, the regional language when talking about emotions and personal or family issues. The author's interest in this topic arises from the use of e-mails as teaching material, as they provide a kind of written conversational style. Since e-mail is increasingly replacing conventional letters, its incorporation into language teaching is relevant. More than this, however, e-mails mirror spoken Indonesian and thus represent a written language which provides insight into the spoken language and brings students into contact with facets of the language that are otherwise neglected in teaching materials.
Maria Polinsky's analysis of ''The Existential Construction in Malagasy'' (243-261) is conducted within a mainstream generative framework. The Malagasy existential construction consists of the verb /-isy/ 'be' (appearing as /m-isy/ and /n-isy/ in the present and past respectively), followed immediately by the obligatory (indefinite) existential theme, then an optional coda, e.g. 'are' + 'three rooms' + 'this house' ('there are three rooms in this house' or 'this house has three rooms'), or 'were' + 'children' + 'at school' ('there were children at school'). Polinsky argues (i) that the existential theme is the object, since indefinite objects form a constituent with the verb in Malagasy and cannot be separated from it (definite objects can be separated, however) and (ii) that the coda may consist of the external argument (i.e. subject) and/or an adjunct. Thus in 'are' + 'three rooms' + 'this house', the subject is 'this house', and 'are three rooms' is the predicate, and the existential construction here and elsewhere in Malagasy encodes a part-whole relationship.
If Mead appears to eschew syntax, Polinsky embraces it wholeheartedly. It is in the nature of the generative framework that one assumes certain properties of syntactic structure and uses them in the analysis of a given language. Thus Polinsky assumes that the existential theme of the existential construction will either be its subject or its object, and she uses morphosyntactic properties to argue for the latter. Interestingly, the main property of the existential theme is that it is inseparable from the verb. This is a property only of indefinite objects in Malagasy (not of definite objects), and one is reminded of indefinite oblique-marked undergoer argument of actor-voice verbs in certain Formosan languages (e.g. Puyuma) and of object incorporation in Tukang Besi (Donohue, this volume) and in many Oceanic languages. In each of these cases the verb is usually analyzed as intransitive and therefore as lacking an object in any surface-syntactic sense. One wonders whether the Malagasy verb + indefinite object (and thence the existential construction) is amenable to a similar analysis.
In her ''Some Aspects of Relations between Deixis and Syntax in Philippine Languages'' (263-276) Lina Shkarban examines the hypothesis that the much discussed difficulty of distinguishing between nouns and verbs in Philippine languages is related to the tendency for information structure to be mapped more directly onto syntax than in many other languages. She shows that deictics (which for her include both demonstratives and case-marking determiners) play an important role in differentiating predicate and subject. In addition to well known Tagalog facts she cites data from Pangasinan, in which different deictics are used in subjects and predicates, and from Cebuano in which adverbial demonstratives encode tense and participate in certain information structure functions. The functional mismatches whereby verbs occur in subject noun phrases and nouns in predicates are a direct result of the fact that the topic is typically encoded as subject and the comment as predicate, so that if the topic happens to be an event, a verbal subject occurs, and if the comment is a class or a known entity a noun phrase predicate occurs.
Shkarban's paper gives a somewhat different perspective on Tagalog syntax from the accustomed discussions of Philippine grammatical relations. I found the connection between this mapping and the very interesting deictic patterns she describes a little difficult to make, but her point appears to be that deictics play (among other things) an important role in encoding predicate-subject relations which would otherwise be potentially ambiguous because of the occurrence of verbs in subjects and noun phrases as predicates. Although her point about mapping is well taken, it seems a little overstated, as Tagalog certainly uses other constructions as well as subject-predicate to encode information structure (Kaufman 2005).
Hein Steinhauer examines ''Synchronic Metathesis and Apocope in Three Austronesian Languages of the Timor Area'' (277-296), namely Helong, Dawanese and Letinese. These synchronic phenomena may be viewed as phonologically conditioned variants of a change which occurs when a word is not phrase-final, i.e. it marks phrase-internal juncture. The variants include loss of final glottal stop, loss of final vowel, and metathesis entailing the word-final open syllable. In Helong and Dawanese this syllable undergoes metathesis such that the onset of the syllable becomes its coda. Letinese has two metathesising variants. One is the same as in Helong and Dawanese. In the other, the word- final vowel and the initial consonant of the following word undergo metathesis, e.g. /vatu masa/ becomes /vat muasa/. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of whether the change reflects shared inheritance or is an areal feature, a question which remains unresolved.
Steinhauer's work is intriguing, the more so as phonologically and functionally similar metathesis occurs in an Oceanic Austronesian language, Rotuman (Schmidt 2003). Phonologically, but not functionally, similar metathesis is also found in Ririo and in Kwara'ae, also Oceanic languages, but closely related neither to each other nor to Rotuman. Oceanic metathesis has already spawned several papers by theoretical phonologists, and as research by Steinhauer and his colleagues continues on Timor area languages I assume that these will also become objects of theoretical discussion.
Part 3. Text studies In ''Form Criticism and Its Applicability to Bugis Historical Texts'' (299-310) Ian Caldwell applies the form critical method, developed by Biblical scholars, to the early part of a Bugis historical text. By analyzing its form, the form critic seeks to identify each constituent part of a text and its literary origins. Caldwell analyzes the first four pericopes (more or less independent units) of the /Mula ritimpaqna Sidénréng/. The Bugis text of the pericopes and their translation takes up just over four pages of the paper. These deal with the pre-Islamic history of the kingdom of Sidénréng, i.e. the period before 1609, and on formal grounds each evidently has a separate origin in an oral tradition which functioned to legitimize political and economic relationships. The author shows how form criticism feeds into historical criticism: although the pericopes are not historical narratives in the modern sense, they contain historical assertions which no present-day Bugis would make and probably reflect memories of the period after 1300.
Entitled ''Ktunu: Clues in the Quest of the Sailfish: Linguistic Insights in Southwest Malukan Narratives (East-Indonesia)'' (311–325) Aone van Engelenhoven's contribution is concerned with southwest Maluku oral traditions. These differ from oral narratives elsewhere in Indonesia because they are prose rather than epic poetry. This means that the mnemonic devices that help the teller to recreate the story at each telling are not rhythmic patterns and lexical parallelisms but /ktunu/, clichés or proverbial sayings which serve as mnemonic triggers for each chunk of the narrative. A /ktunu/ may itself entail a lexical parallelism, but it functions somewhat differently from poetic parallelism. Van Engelenhoven shows that /ktunu/ composed of common nouns are governed by phonological rules. Many /ktunu/, however, are place names or personal names, each half composed of morphemes that in themselves recall a story for both storyteller and audience. Their inclusion helps to pin down the story and its extended meanings and contribute to a situation (common in oral narrative traditions) whereby there is little room for the storyteller's individual input.
As Van Engelenhoven mentions, his paper takes up a theme introduced into the anthropology of East Nusantara by Fox (1988), namely the use of lexical pairings in stylized speech. Perhaps the most interesting feature that Van Engelenhoven describes is the fact that in SW Maluku many of these pairings are proper names which themselves tell a story, the audience's awareness of which is crucial to their full understanding of the narrative and its implications.
In his ''/Sureq/ versus /lontaraq/: The Great Divide?'' (327–338) Sirtjo Koolhof examines the now conventional use of these two terms to label Bugis written genres, and finds that they reflect a division on a Western model into 'literature' (in the sense of /belles lettres/) and other writings which dates from as recently as the 1970s. The division has no basis in Bugis tradition. Koolhof instead identifies certain genres which do have a traditional basis: the poetic /La Galigo/ texts, the /toloq/ (heroic poems with fictional or semi- fictional content), and /attoriolong/, which ''are essentially an elaboration of a genealogical core''. The /toloq/ potentially marked the beginnings of modern authored literature, but, as Koolhof laments, this potential was not fulfilled, and Bugis literature is now a museum piece.
EVALUATION The editors of almost any modern linguistic festschrift face a problem, namely how to ensure sufficient thematic unity among contributions to satisfy a publisher that the book will sell and yet to avoid excluding thereby too many scholars who might otherwise have wished to contribute. The editors of this volume have been strikingly successful in balancing these goals. It is a varied and interesting collection of papers, yet, as I noted above, it displays a unity centered on Ülo Sirk's interests. Every linguist with Indonesian interests will want to have this book in their library, and I suspect that most Austronesianists will too.
The book is fairly free of typographical errors, apart from those mentioned above in association with Donohue's paper, plus 'tact' for 'tack' and 'restricing' for 'restricting' in Mead's paper, and the shocking typo 'Conclsuions' in the large bold-printed title at the top of p. 125. A volume of iv + 338 pages needs a good binding, and this one has a strong hardback binding. My one complaint is that some readers will have trouble with the smaller-than-usual size of the type.
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Adellar, K. Alexander. 2004. Where does Malay come from? Twenty years of discussions about homeland, migrations and classifications. _Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde_ 160: 1–30.
Dahl, Otto Christian. 1973. _Proto-Austronesian_. Oslo: Studentlitteratur.
Dol, Philomena. 2004. _A Grammar of Maybrat: A language of the Bird’s Head Peninsula, Papua Province, Indonesia_. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER Malcolm Ross is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. His research interests include the history of Austronesian and Papuan languages and language contact.
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