Documentation of Northern Alta: Grammar, Texts and Glossary

Documentation of Northern Alta: grammar, texts and glossary Alexandro-Xavier García Laguía ADVERTIMENT. La consulta d’aquesta tesi queda condicionada a l’acceptació de les següents condicions d'ús: La difusió d’aquesta tesi per mitjà del servei TDX (www.tdx.cat) i a través del Dipòsit Digital de la UB (diposit.ub.edu) ha estat autoritzada pels titulars dels drets de propietat intel·lectual únicament per a usos privats emmarcats en activitats d’investigació i docència. No s’autoritza la seva reproducció amb finalitats de lucre ni la seva difusió i posada a disposició des d’un lloc aliè al servei TDX ni al Dipòsit Digital de la UB. No s’autoritza la presentació del seu contingut en una finestra o marc aliè a TDX o al Dipòsit Digital de la UB (framing). Aquesta reserva de drets afecta tant al resum de presentació de la tesi com als seus continguts. En la utilització o cita de parts de la tesi és obligat indicar el nom de la persona autora. ADVERTENCIA. 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Documentation of Northern Alta: grammar, texts and glossary Programa de doctorat en Ciència Cognitiva i Llenguatge Doctorand: Alexandro-Xavier García Laguía Director: Lawrence Reid Director: Ulrike Mosel Tutor: Carme Junyent ii Para ti, mamá… iii Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank all the members of the Alta communities for accepting me and for teaching me their language. I have learned a lot from them not only as a linguist but also as a person. A special mention goes to two young Alta, for their help and willingness to document their language: Maebell Fernandez and Jennifer Marques. I wish to thank Carme Junyent, my tutor at the University of Barcelona, for encouraging me to pursue my studies in linguistics and for her unwavering support throughout my Phd. My sincere gratitude goes to Laurie Reid for suggesting the Northern Alta language for this dissertation, for helping me contact the Alta for the first time, for his support and help over these years and for everything he has taught me. I am also immensely grateful to Ulrike Mosel for inspiring me and encouraging me in my analysis of the grammar. I was very fortunate to have them both as my supervisors. I am also very grateful to the ELDP program for providing me with the funding necessary for this project, and to the staff at the ELAR archive for the many things they have taught me on language documentation. Many thanks to Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Sophie Salffner, Vera Ferreira, and to the ELDP panel for believing in this project. I wish to thank all my colleagues working on Austronesian languages, for providing insights and productive feedback on my work and ideas. I also wish to thank Marilyn Gallego, for helping me so many times during these years and for the many things I have learned from her. Without her help the collection of data of the Northern Alta language would have been much more difficult. I also am grateful to my friends who have helped me in different aspects of this project, Harry Few, Brendan Ebdner, Marianne Collier, my great friends from La Mancha and Beijing, Geny Gonzales, Ricardo Quilatan Lucía Medea, Ivo Spira, Marta Cusido, Ana Sevilla, Aissa Boubou, Michelle Wu, Abbie Bentley and Clycia Peixoto. Finally, I wish to thank my family for their unconditional support. My brothers have always been inexhaustible sources of inspiration and my parents have provided me infinite amounts of love. Without them I could not have achieved this project. iv v Resumen Northern Alta (códico iso: aqn) es una lengua „Negrito‟ hablada por menos de 300 personas en la zona oeste de la isla de Luzón, en las Filipinas. Sus hablantes son negritos, un grupo étnico perteneciente a las poblaciones austroloides-melanesias consideradas como las primeras en habitar las islas, habiendo llegado al territorio hace al menos 50.000 años. Como muchas otras lenguas del archipiélago Filipino, la lengua no se está transmitiendo a la generación de niños y por tanto necesita ser documentada y descrita con urgencia. El presente estudio trata de responder a esta necesitad. Esta tesis doctoral es uno de los resultados del proyecto de documentación de la lengua Northern Alta, en el cual hemos producido un total de 19 horas de grabaciones de video y audio, de la cuales hemos transcrito y traducido 13 horas. El corpus de grabaciones transcritas ha proporcionado los datos que aparecen en este trabajo, que consiste en una descripción de la gramática de la lengua, un texto de 25 minutos glosado (grabación 103) y un glosario de 2400 entradas (alta – inglés, inglés, alta). Abstract Northern Alta (iso code: aqn) is a Negrito language spoken by fewer than 300 people in the Eastern side of Luzon Island in the Philippines. Northern Alta is spoken by Negritos, who are part of the Australoid-Melanesian populations considered as the first inhabitants of the Philippines, arriving to the territory at least 50,000 years ago. Like many other languages in the Philippines, Northern Alta is currently not being trasmitted to the next generation and thus requires urgent documentation and description. We attempt to adress these needs in the present work. This PhD dissertation is one of the descriptive outputs of a language documentation project in which we have recorded a total of 19 hours of video and audio, and we have transcribed and translated 13 hours. The corpus of annotated recordings provides the data for this dissertation, which consists of a description of the grammar of the language, a 25-minute text with interlinear morpheme glossing (recording 103), and a glossary of 2,400 items (Alta – English, English-Alta). vi Table of contents (short version) 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 2. Phonology .......................................................................................................................27 3. Morphology .....................................................................................................................51 4. Basic clauses ..................................................................................................................75 5. Word classes ................................................................................................................ 107 6. Case .............................................................................................................................. 185 7. Voice-marked words .................................................................................................... 219 8. Glossed text: “The story of Minero” ........................................................................... 251 9. Glossary ........................................................................................................................ 347 10. Conclusions ................................................................................................................ 419 11. References .................................................................................................................. 423 Appendix A: list of all abbreviations in this disssertation ............................................. 429 Appendix B: glossing of word classes ........................................................................... 433 Appendix C: list of recordings of the language ............................................................. 437 vii viii Table of contents 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Aims of this study ......................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Background of the Alta language ................................................................................. 1 1.3 Previous research on Northern Alta ............................................................................

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