Object verbs: link from Timor-Alor- Pantar to Trans-New-Guinea An exploration of their typological and historical implications Glenn Alan Windschuttel BSc(Adv Maths)/BA(Hons)(Sydney) A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics September 2018 This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship ii STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY I hereby certify that the work embodied in the thesis is my own work, conducted under normal supervision. The thesis contains no material which has been accepted, or is being examined, for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 and any approved embargo. Glenn Windschuttel iii Abstract The languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar (TAP) are notable for their object agreement prefixes. Previously, this has been highlighted because this exists largely without subject agreement (a rare pattern crosslinguistically; Klamer 2014, Siewierska 2011) and the proliferation of different prefix series and the semantics they express (Fedden et al 2014, 2013, Kratochvíl 2011, inter alia). One particular feature has not raised much comment, despite its rarity and difficulties it raises for syntactic theory (Chumakina & Bond 2016): object agreement is only obligatory for a lexical class of transitive verbs. This is particularly unfortunate since classes defined in the same way are a feature of many Trans-New-Guinea (TNG) languages, the prefixing class labelled object verbs, even being reconstructed to the protolanguage (Suter 2012). They exist in a number of non-contiguous groups of families: Dani; Ok and Anim; Kainantu-Goroka and Finisterre-Huon. These languages have dealt with this uninflectability in different ways, through support verbs, that resemble auxiliaries, or free object pronouns. What they all share are cognate agreement prefixes based on the TNG pronominals (see Suter 2012 cf: Ross 2005). The TAP languages also look to have object verbs defined by prefixes that may well be derived from these same pronominals. This connection between the TNG and TAP is especially significant since the pattern is crosslinguistically rare. This implies that it is unlikely to have been caused by chance. This provides important extra evidence of TNG-TAP interconnectedness. Moreover, it is a serious question whether these lexical verb classes would likely be diffused and apply to the whole transitive verbal lexicon of TAP (conjugation classes are not likely to be recombinantly borrowed; Panov 2015, Koutsoukos 2016, or even Robbeets 2015, 2017). This may leave inheritance as the most probable explanation for why object verbs are found in both TAP and TNG. This would then add to the growing evidence for the TNG descent of TAP. iv Acknowledgements Thanks to my different supervisors, Bill Palmer, Åshild Næss, Catriona Malau, (by a mistake in paperwork only, Alan Libert) and Bill again, when I started at Newcastle, the active ELDTA community, Valentina, Stefano, Stephen, Sabrina, Simon (who wasn’t part of ELDTA but was always in MC117), Aslak, Peter and Peggy who came a year late to find the room mostly empty. Thank you, Adam, for putting me up when I was up there and being around through the rest of the thesis and Nat for hanging out while I was up there. All the people who helped me in Alor: František, Mas, Jumaat and Rudy Sanga, Mama Putih and their families, bapak desa Buraga, ‘Ibu Santri’ and the ol minak there, Miler, Halima, etc. and Antoinette for suggesting Kui as a language to research and Nick Evans for putting me in touch with her (and Bill Foley for looking out for me as I went over there). Thanks Marcel, Katubi and Thung Ju Lan for sharing your data with me and the familiar face while in Moru. Thank you again, František, your kindness hosting me when I was in Singapore, organising my talk to his department and his Abui data. Thanks to Marian, George, Hanna and Eric (and his friends) for welcoming me in Leiden. Thanks to Bill Foley for letting me see the Brandson data, Don for access to his Kursav corpus, Sebastian Fedden for his help with Mian. Thanks to my parents and brother for putting up with a lounge room full of thesis papers for 4 years or just put up with me in general. Same goes for my friends (though not sure how much will change after I’ve finished). Thank you to the Firebird foundation and ALS for the fieldwork and community development funding I still need to use. Finally, thanks to God to whom all knowledge belongs. v Tables Table 1.1: Alignment and number of pronominal prefixes for a selection of TAP languages (based on Klamer 4 and Schapper 2010, with additions from my own data and Haan 2001) Table 1.2: Different pronominal paradigms of some languages of Alor 6 Table 1.3: Proto-Alor-Pantar (Holton et al 2012), Proto-North-Halmahera (Donohue 2008:49) and Proto-Trans- 8 New-Guinea pronominals (Ross 2005, 2006). Table 2.1: Proto-Trans-New-Guinea pronominals (Ross 2005, Suter 2012) 14 Table 2.2: pFH object verbs, shaded cells contain verbs with higher level connections (Suter 2012) 18 Table 2.3: Paradigm of support verb constructions compared with regular prefixing verbs (prefixes from Renck 25 1975; duals omitted) Table 2.4: The verbs hwahwid ‘rub’ and wasib ‘hit’ conjugated for different objects (using data from Olsson & 26 Usher 2016). Shaded cells derive from support constructions. Table 2.5: Different situations requiring support verbs for third singular objects (situations where support verbs 27 are required are shaded) Table 2.6: Shared consonants for object prefixes in Mountain Ok 37 Table 2.7: Object prefixes in Bimin (Weber 1997:29) 37 Table 2.8: Prefixing verbs in Lower Grand Valley Dani (Bromley 1981), Nggem (Etherington 2002:115), Wano 40 (Burung 2017; it is unclear if these are the only object verbs in Wano), Western Dani (Barclay 2008:333f), and Yali-Angguruk (Riesberg 2017) Table 2.9: Nggem ba ‘put’ (Etherington 2002:115), the older first person forms from Lower Grand Valley Dani 42 hei ‘put’ (Bromley 1981:103), immediate part forms for Western Dani (Barclay 2008:337,392; note that the only evidence of the reflexive alveolar stop in the immediate past is the devoicing) Table 2.10: Prefixing verbs in Tairora (Vincent 2003:580) 44 Table 2.11: Prefixing verbs in Tairora (Vincent 2003:580), Awa (Loving and McKaughan 1964) and Kosena 46 (Marks 1975) of the Kainantu subgroup Table 2.12: Many of the prefixing verbs in Hua dialect of Yagaria (Haiman 1991) 47 Table 2.13: The verbs corresponding to the same meaning across different Gorokan languages in Haiman (1991) 48 and Scott (1978) (Alekano data is from Deibler 2008). Table 2.14: Undergoer affixes in Marind (Olsson & Usher 2016) 52 Table 2.15: Object affixes in Gogodala (Voorhoeve 1970:1251) 55 Table 2.16: Object markers in Mek – Yale from Heeschen (2000), Eipo and Nalca from Svärd (2013) using 62 Heeschen (1978) for the Eipo data Table 2.17: Object agreement in Asmat (Voorhoeve 1965) 64 Table 3.1: The two paradigms of pronominal agreement prefixes 78 Table 3.2: Prefixing intransitive verbs 79 Table 3.3: Transitive verb roots according to method of agreement (my fieldnotes, Shiohara 2010 and Katubi et 81 al 2013) Table 3.4: Dative transitive verbs from Table 3.3 83 Table 3.5: Dative verbs categorised into transitivity classes 84 Table 3.6: Patientive verbs in the same classes of Table 3.5 85 Table 3.7: Transitive verbs divided according to role of the object and agreement class 90 Table 3.8: Object prefixes in Teiwa (Klamer 2010:79) 92 Table 3.9: Kaera object prefixes (Klamer 2014b) 97 Table 3.10: Prefixes in Western Pantar (Holton 2014:40) 99 Table 3.11: Verbal prefix classes in Western Pantar 104 Table 3.12: Prefixes in Nedebang (Holton 2016:3). 104 Table 3.13: Agreement prefixes of Blagar (Steinhauer 2014:192) 107 Table 3.14: Adang person prefixes (Fedden et al 2013:70 based on Haan 2001) 110 Table 3.15: Klon Undergoer pronominals (Baird 2008:140) 113 Table 3.16: Abui person prefixes (Fedden et al 2014:51) 117 Table 3.17: Kamang person prefixes (Fedden et al 2014:52) 124 Table 3.18: Wersing person prefixes (Schapper & Hendery 2014:370) 127 Table 3.19: Sawila person prefixes (Kratochvíl 2014:34) 130 Table 3.20: Fataluku agreement prefixes (van Engelenhoven 2009:338-9) 137 vi Table 3.21: Agreement prefixes in Bunaq (Schapper 2010:338) 139 Table 3.22: Prefixing transitive verb classes in Bunaq (Schapper 2010:338) 139 Table 3.23: Agreement systems of the TAP languages compared 143-4 Table 3.24: Object agreement in TAP languages with multiple complete prefix series 146 Table 4.1: Number of obligatory verbs from each series 150 Table 4.2: no- prefixes in Alor languages 152 Table 4.3: Different forms of u- prefixes in TAP languages 156 Table 4.4: Pantar and Alor cognates showing equivalence of final <n(g)> and zero 177 Table 4.5: All prefixed verbs in Teiwa (Klamer 2010:113) 184 Table 4.6: Demonstratives related to Bunaq ha(badi) 186 Table 5.1: Proto-Alor-Pantar (Holton et al 2012) and Proto-Trans-New-Guinea pronominals (Ross 2005, 2006).