Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Vol. 165, no. 1 (2009), pp. 129–189 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/btlv URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-100095 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0006-2294 Book reviews Johnny Tjia, A grammar of Mualang; An Ibanic language of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Leiden: LOT (Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics), 2007, 438 pp. ISBN 9789078328247. Price: EUR 32.27 (paperback). ALEXANDER ADELAAR Asia Institute, University of Melbourne [email protected] The traditional languages in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan Province are pre- dominantly Malayic and Bidayuhic (although some other language groups are also represented). Mualang belongs to the Ibanic branch of the Malayic lan- guage group and is spoken in the Belitang Hulu, Belitang Hilir and Belitang districts of Sekadau Regency (formerly part of Sanggau Regency). Based on purely linguistic criteria, it is clearly in a dialect relation with Iban, one of the main languages in Sarawak and a minority language in West Kalimantan. It is probably even more like Iban than some other Ibanic languages, which have not developed the diphthongs that are so typical of Iban and Mualang (for example, datay ‘come’; jalay ‘road’; tikay ‘mat’). Notable differences between the two varieties are that Iban does not exhibit nasal preplosion and postplo- sion (see below), and that Iban has acquired a transitive suffix –ka, whereas in Mualang this element is still a preposition. According to Tjia, another dif- ference is that in Iban mid vowels are phonemic whereas in Mualang they are allophones of high vowels, but this is just a matter of analysis, as Scott (1957) was able to show that Iban high and mid vowels were still allophones, in spite of the rather non-phonemic Iban spelling conventions. Mualang is perhaps best known as the language of an impressive epic called the Kana Sera (Song of Pregnancy), a masterpiece of oral literature. It was recorded and translated (into Dutch) by Father Dunselman (1955), whose annotations to the Kana Sera contain many comments on the language. Other valuable contributions to the study of Mualang are Sister Pungak’s prelimi- nary structural analysis and lexicon (Pungak 1976a, 1976b). Johnny Tjia’s study of Mualang is the first comprehensive grammatical description of an Ibanic language other than Iban itself. It is much richer than any of the existing Iban linguistic studies, and it is also the most detailed and thorough analysis of any language in West Kalimantan. The first part (306 pages) describes the structure of Mualang; it is followed by 80 pages of texts with interlinear glossing representing several literary genres, a 22-page Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 130 Book reviews Mualang-English wordlist, and a 16-page English-Mualang finder list. The result of ten months of linguistic fieldwork in 2002, it mainly concentrates on the upstream dialect of Mualang as spoken in Tabuk Hulu village in Belitang Hulu District. Although theoretically open-minded, the author basically fol- lows a functional-typological approach to the phonology and morphosyntax of Mualang predominantly based on the works of Givón (2001a, 2001b) and Payne (1997). Morphosyntactically, Mualang and other Ibanic languages are rather similar to Malay. Typical Mualang features are the occurrence of preplosion of final nasals, postplosion of intervocalic nasals, vowel nasalization, and the absence of suffixes. These features are not unique to Mualang and apply equally to many other (Ibanic and Bidayuhic) languages in the northern parts of West Kalimantan and in West Sarawak. The importance of Tjia’s thorough treatment of these and other features is consequently that it will also greatly help the description of other languages in the area that share these areal features, whether they are genetically directly related to Mualang or not. From a historical linguistic perspective, it is highly relevant for the history of Malay because it describes a language that is closely related to Malay, and yet has developed largely independently of it throughout its history. Finally, comprehensive descriptions of Malayic languages in West Kalimantan such as Tjia’s provide the ultimate testing material for the theory that Borneo is the homeland of Malay. The book covers the main aspects of phonology and grammar with equal care and includes sections on nasal preplosion and postplosion, reduplica- tion, inversion and other aspects of word order, compounding, verb serializa- tion and other clause combinations, referentiality and identifiability. Tjia’s analysis of the voice system is particularly enlightening. Departing from the traditional distinction between active and passive, he introduces an additional ‘inverse’ voice. The difference between these three voices is a matter of transitivity and determines the relative topicality of agent and patient (‘perspectivization’ in Givón’s terms). Active verbs (marked with N-) foreground the agent; inverse verbs (with no voice prefix) foreground the patient (and hence background the agent); passive verbs (marked with da-) demote the agent. This is demonstrated in the following three sentences with transitive verbs: 1. Active: Urang nyuri [N-curi] manuk ku person N-steal chicken 1s ‘Someone stole my chicken.’ (agent and patient present; agent foregrounded) Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 131 2. Inverse: (M’ih nipu kami). Asa pia’, m’ih kami bunuh (You deceive us) therefore 2s.masculine 1p.exclusive kill ‘(You deceive us). Therefore, you’re going to get killed by us.’ (agent and patient present; patient foregrounded) 3. Passive: Manuk ku da-curi chicken 1s passive-steal ‘My chicken was stolen.’ (patient present; agent demoted) Tjia brings these voice categories into further alignment with a fourth voice category, the antipassive, which has ba- or zero prefixed to a transitive verb and demotes the patient: 4. Antipassive: Urang ba-bunuh person antipassive-kill ‘People kill (that is ‘people are engaged in killing’).’ (agent present; patient demoted) Tjia concedes that his proposed solution needs further discourse-based research, but his treatment of transitive constructions marked with zero as separate voice constructions is certainly innovative and promising. While this book is a great asset to Bornean linguistics, some critical remarks are in order. The author spends unnecessarily much time explaining linguistic phe- nomena and terms that are generally known and agreed upon among lin- guists. This sometimes reduces the pleasure of reading, especially if the data allow for a straightforward analysis. At times he overcategorizes, as, for instance, in the case of intransitive verb roots (p. 137), or of temporal adver- bial clauses (pp. 283-7). The latter are divided into subordinating clauses and other clauses, whereas in fact almost all the clauses under discussion are subordinating clauses. Mualang has preploded nasals. These are not phonemic: in fact, in the Mualang Hilir dialect, they are apparently so negligible that Dunselman (1955) did not mention them (let alone indicate them in his spelling of the Kana Sera). Tjia describes them as nasals preceded by a homorganic ‘short’ voiceless stop, one that is not fully realized but is much weakened and preceded by a quick opening of the velum. He goes on to say that ‘[i]n other words, before the point of articulation of the inserted voiceless stop is reached, a glottal stop may be heard’. However, an unreleased voiceless stop is definitely not a glottal stop, and there is a clear difference between the real- p ization of malam ‘night’ as [mã.la m] or as *[mã.laʔm]. Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 132 Book reviews Related to this is a general lack of attention to the glottal stop. The author acknowledges it as a phoneme, but provides no minimal pairs of glottal stop with k (which is unreleased!) and with ø, although the wordlist includes three-way oppositions like keba ‘all kinds’ vs keba’ ‘therefore’ vs kebak ‘open’. Furthermore, in Tjia’s practical spelling of Mualang, the same symbol (an apostrophe) is used for the glottal stop and the sometimes barely audible voiced stops in postploded nasals, as in am’i’ ‘take (away)’ which is realized b as [am iʔ]. Postploded nasals in section 2.3 (on syllable and root structure) need more attention. On pages 62 and 79 we are told that nyin ‘that (over there)’ cannot be used anaphorically, but page 67 gives an example of just such a usage. On page 70, the author speculates that s-ari ‘one day’ lacks a classifier because concepts like ari ‘day’ do not have ‘physical appearance’, notwithstanding the fact that page 71 has s-uti’ ari, (with classifier uti’), and that page 59 explains that nonphysi- cal things such as lagu ‘song’ and adat ‘custom’ are used with a classifier. The clitical element =m (/m=) remains totally unexplained: this is an awk- ward omission, not only for its meaning but also for its phonotactic behav- iour, and its frequent occurrence (at least 37 times as a postclitic and seven times as a proclitic) in the book. Given their general use all over West Borneo, the way some words in the book are glossed is underspecified, for example ipar biras ‘siblings-in-law’ (p. 64) refers to the relationship between people married to siblings; ba-pen’ing (burung) ‘be engaged in (bird)-listening’ (p. 166) is correct as a literal trans- lation but probably has a more charged meaning in a society where bird augury plays a central role. In other cases, the glosses seem too specific: akay ‘[exclamation] expressing (unpleasant) surprise or surprise mixed with dis- agreement or dislike’ (p. 260) is in fact used to express any kind of surprise; urat means ‘muscle; nerve; vein’ rather than just ‘blood vessels’, especially in the expression ba-lepa tulang-urat ‘rest oneself’ (literally ‘rest one’s bones and muscles’) on page 163.