Open Access College of Asia and the Pacific the Australian National University

Open Access College of Asia and the Pacific The Australian National University Papers from 12-ICAL, Volume 3 Malcolm D. Ross and I Wayan Arka (eds.) A-PL 018 / SAL 004 This volume contains papers describing and discussing language change in the Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia and Taiwan. The issues discussed include the unusual development of verbal infixes in the Cendrawasih Bay languages, dialect variations, patterns of borrowing and language contact in Taiwan and in Flores-Alor-Pantar languages of Indonesia, diachronic and synchronic aspects of voice systems of Sulawesi languages, and the reconstruction of Proto Austronesian personal pronouns. This volume should be of interest to Austronesianists and historical linguists. Asia-Pacific Linguistics SAL: Studies on Austronesian Languages EDITORIAL BOARD: I Wayan Arka, Mark Donohue, Bethwyn Evans, Nicholas Evans,Simon Greenhill, Gwendolyn Hyslop, David Nash, Bill Palmer,Andrew Pawley, Malcolm Ross, Paul Sidwell, Jane Simpson. Published by Asia-Pacific Linguistics College of Asia and the Pacific The Australian National University Canberra ACT 2600 Australia Copyright is vested with the author(s) First published: 2015 URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/13386 National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Title: Language Change in Austronesian languages: papers from 12-ICAL, Volume 3 / edited by Malcolm D. Ross and I Wayan Arka ISBN: 9781922185198 (ebook) Series: Asia-Pacific linguistics 018 / Studies on Austronesian languages 004 Subjects: Austronesian languages--Congresses. Dewey Number: 499.2 Other Creators/Contributors: Ross, Malcolm D., editor. Arka, I Wayan, editor. Australian National University. Department of Linguistics. Asia-Pacific Linguistics International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (12th: 2012 : Bali, Indonesia) Cover illustration: courtesy of Vida Mastrika Typeset by I Wayan Arka and Vida Mastrika . Preface and Acknowledgements The 12th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics was held in Denpasar- Bali in July 2012. The organisers are publishing a series of compilations of papers based on specific topics, and the present volume is one of the planned four volumes containing papers that describe and discuss language change in the Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia and Taiwan. All papers have been peer-reviewed and revised before publication. The editors would like to thank our colleagues who happily acted as referees: Kunio Nishiyama, Hsiu-chuan Liao, Sander Adelaar, René van den Berg, Arthur Holmer, David Gil, and Loren Billings. We also thank Bryce Kositz and Vida Mastrika for their editorial help and technical assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication. About the editors MALCOLM ROSS is an Emeritus Professor in Linguistics in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. His research area is the reconstruction of the histories of the Austronesian languages of New Guinea and the Pacific and of the Papuan languages of New Guinea. Until recently he also worked on the early history of Austronesian, focusing on the Formosan languages. A special interest is how one distinguishes between the outcomes of contact and of inheritance, and between the outcomes of bilingually induced change and language shift. He has published numerous articles and edited several books on the Austronesian language family. I WAYAN ARKA is a Fellow at the Department of Linguistics, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific ANU and a senior Lecturer at Udayana University Bali (English Department and Graduate Program in Linguistics). His interests are in descriptive, theoretical and typological aspects of Austronesian and Papuan languages of Indonesia. His publications include, among others, books and journal articles on Balinese, Indonesian, Rongga, and Marori. He is currently working on on Marori as part of the ARC-funded project on the Languages of Southern New Guinea (2011-2015) and on his Humboldt project on the languages of Flores (2012-2014). Contents 1 Emily A. Gasser 1 - 17 The development of verbal infixation in Cenderawasih Bay 2 Laura C. Robinson 19 - 33 The Alor-Pantar (Papuan) languages and Austronesian contact in East Nusantara 3 Philippe Grangé 35 - 50 The Lamaholot dialect chain (East Flores, Indonesia) 4 David Mead and Joanna Smith 51 - 78 The voice systems of Wotu, Barang-barang and Wolio: Synchronic and diachronic perspectives 5 Yuko Kitada 79 - 92 The etymology of the sociative-progressive circumfix in Suwawa (Gorontalo-Mongondowic) 6 Amy Pei-jung Lee 93 - 107 Contact-induced sub-dialects in Toda Seediq 7 Malcolm Ross 109 - 122 Revising the reconstruction of early Austronesian personal pronouns 1 The development of verbal infixation in Cenderawasih Bay EMILY A. GASSER 1 Introduction Verbal agreement in Wamesa, an Austronesian language of West Papua, Indonesia, is in most cases expressed by the addition of a prefix to the verb root. In the 2nd- and 3rd- person singular, however, this affix surfaces instead as an infix inserted after the root- initial consonant. This placement leads to cases of vowel hiatus which could easily be avoided if prefixation were to apply rather than infixation, a pattern which is dispreferred both cross-linguistically and language-internally. In synchronic terms, this can be difficult to account for non-stipulatively. The diachronic story, however, has more explanatory power. While the Cenderawasih Bay languages are, as a family, severely under- documented, existing evidence suggests that articulatory and perceptual pressures overcame typological markedness, causing agreement prefixes to migrate into infixal position in an ancestor language of Wamesa. More specifically, coarticulation of the prefix-final vowel and the root-initial consonant, reinforced by improved discrimination of contrasts in a prominent position, led eventually to full metathesis (Blevins & Garrett (2004)’s Perceptual Metathesis), instantiated synchronically as infixation. This did not apply to the 1st-person singular or 3rd-person plural non-human agreement prefixes, despite their similar shape, as they were not present in the language in an eligible form at the time metathesis took place. Bermúdez-Otero (2006) notes that a theory of local, myopic sound change such as that set forth by Ohala (1992) and espoused here “predicts that phonologization is blind: it is driven by local phonetic properties and operates without regard for its global effects on the phonological system”, leading, for example, to vowel hiatus. This is precisely what I argue happened here. Certain phonetic properties of the affixed verb in an earlier form of the language, in this case higher degrees of coarticulation of the prefix vowel and root-initial consonant, which originally were simply part of the normal range of variation, were phonologized so that they themselves became the target pronunciation. This led to ambiguity as to the linear order of the vowel and consonant, already strongly coarticulated, and created a situation of metathesis. Each or these changes were locally improving in terms of the specific segments which they affected, but when taken in the larger context of the word created a more marked structure. This paper is organized as follows. In §2 I describe the pattern in question and the source of the data used here. §3.1 gives an overview of the Cenderawasih Bay languages, of which Wamesa is a part, and the distribution of infixation patterns within them, and an overview of the available data sources is given in §3.2. An argument for a single common source for these patterns is given in §3.3, with examples from several languages. §3.5 Asia-Pacific Linguistics, 2015. Copyright held by the authors, released under Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0) 1 2 Emily A. Gasser gives evidence that the metathesis which led to infixation was specific to the 2nd and 3rd person singular agreement markers, and §3.6 discusses the articulatory motivations for change and the path taken to produce the modern forms, with additional evidence from the Mixtecan language Trique. §3.8 and §3.7 discuss the first person singular and 3rd person plural non-human agreement markers. §4 concludes. 2 Wamesa Verbal Agreement: Background and Data Wamesa ([wad], also called Wandamen) is a member of the South Halmahera-West New Guinea (SHWNG) branch of Austronesian (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013), with approximately 8,000 speakers in the south-eastern Bird’s Head of New Guinea (Henning et al. 1991). Wamesa verbs are inflected to agree with their subject in person, number, and, in the 3rd person plural, animacy.1 Verbal agreement morphology is found throughout the SHWNG languages of the Bird’s Head. Wamesa is typical of these languages in making an inclusive/exclusive distinction in the first person non-singular and in differentiating between singular, dual, and plural subjects; some languages use distinct agreement markers for trial subjects as well (Anceaux 1961). Though Wamesa has a set of morphologically transparent trial pronouns, the verbal agreement markers for trial subjects are identical to those used for the plural and will not be treated separately here. The Wamesa data used here was gathered during fieldwork conducted over a period of seven months in the city of Manokwari in West Papua, Indonesia, and the nearby villages of Windesi and Sombokoro, focusing on the Windesi dialect of Wamesa. This data largely agrees with that given in previous published descriptions of Wamesa

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