A Grammar of West Coast Bajau
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
A GRAMMAR OF WEST COAST BAJAU by MARK T. MILLER Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON August 2007 Copyright © by Mark T. Miller 2007 All Rights Reserved This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Edith Mirafuentes, whose loving service to the West Coast Bajau people has always inspired me. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Department of Linguistics and TESOL and the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Arlington for awarding me the scholarships and travel funds that made possible my research abroad and writing at home. I would also like to thank the Sabah State Museum for its role in sponsoring my work. I am greatly thankful and indebted to my supervisor for this project, Paul Kroeger, who generously gave of his time and expertise to work patiently with me through the successive drafts of this grammar. I have much respect for his scholarly gifts as well as his willingness to serve others with those gifts. I also acknowledge, with gratitude for their time and valuable input, the other members of my doctoral committee: Laurel Smith Stvan, Don Burquest, and Tom Headland. My thanks also to Shin Ja Hwang for her comments on portions of my work; and to Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., who made himself available to look over my data and answer questions, whether in person (at workshops) or via email. I want to express my deep appreciation to the West Coast Bajau people of Menunggui village in Kota Belud, and especially to Jumel Hj. Ghani and his family, for hosting me during my fieldwork visits. I am grateful to Jumel and to my other language consultants for giving freely of their time and patience to help me: Adnan Hj. Abdul Razak, Mohd. Sirun Siboh, Subian Bte Sangki, Jenair Subeh, Razin Hj. Nor, and Kaili Bte Said. Without these people I could never have written this grammar. I also wish to thank all my other West Coast Bajau friends who have, in one way or another, contributed to my understanding of their language and iv culture. These include Jena Bte Bangsa, Nur Ani Bte Hj. Mohd. Zin, Rioh Jatin, Baisah Bte Rioh, Maulani Hj. Diman, and Awang Mesri. Thanks also to the United Sabah Bajau Organization (USBO), in particular Chendramata Hj. Sinteh and Mohd. Said Hinayat, for their personal friendship and encouragement of my research, and their efforts to promote the welfare of their people through language development. I am grateful to my colleagues who serve with SIL International in Malaysia, whose friendship and shared expertise have greatly enriched my life and work. Special thanks to Hank Bradley for serving as my mentor during the initial months of language and culture learning in Kota Belud; and also to Michael Boutin, whose passion for linguistics (and for RRG) encouraged me to go further in my study of West Coast Bajau. I also want to thank Dave and Joan Nichols who graciously hosted my wife and me during our stays in Kota Kinabalu in summer 2006. I gratefully acknowledge the friendship and assistance of the late Edith Mirafuentes, whose study of West Coast Bajau long preceded my own, and who generously made available to me her corpus of interlinearized texts for my own use. Edith corresponded with me at length about the grammar of Bajau and stimulated my thinking about the language. Her desire to promote the welfare of the West Coast Bajau through mother tongue literacy has been a great inspiration to me. Thanks also to those SIL linguists working in other Sama-Bajaw languages who have fielded my questions about their languages of study: Doug and Phyllis Trick; Kemp Pallesen; Chuck Walton; and Millard and Virginia Collins. I wish to acknowledge Irene Tucker of SIL International who provided the Sabah language and dialect maps. I am grateful to Tim Wood, whose personal encouragement and practical support helped me stay the course in this doctoral program during some difficult stretches. I wish to v acknowledge the love, support, encouragement, and prayers of my parents, who have never stopped believing in me. I am deeply grateful to my wife, Rachel, who has stood by me, prayed for me, and supported me in countless ways—including extensive help in formatting the document—so that I could complete this project. Finally, I thank God with all my heart, for He is surely my help, and “the One who sustains me” (Psalm 54:4). May 31, 2007 vi ABSTRACT A GRAMMAR OF WEST COAST BAJAU Publication No. ______ Mark T. Miller, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2007 Supervising Professor: Paul R. Kroeger This dissertation is a description of the grammar of West Coast (WC) Bajau, a western Austronesian language spoken in Sabah, Malaysia by some 60,000 people. Drawing extensively from elicited data as well as a corpus of compiled texts, I describe the language at its various levels: phonology, morphology, phrase structure, clause structure, clause-combining operations, and discourse. In its verbal morphology, WC Bajau shows a (marked) actor- orientation vs. (unmarked) undergoer orientation with both transitive and intransitive verb roots. I show evidence for a verb phrase in WC Bajau, in one (and possibly two) voices. Investigation of the pragmatic structure of the clause shows that WC Bajau has both a topic and a focal position preverbally. Though primarily descriptive in nature, the grammar devotes some space to theoretical issues concerned with the voice system, which has long been the subject of debate among linguists and typologists studying western Austronesian languages. I argue on primarily vii syntactic grounds that WC Bajau shows little evidence for an ergative-antipassive voice system, as has been proposed for a number of other Sama-Bajaw languages. Instead, WC Bajau patterns as a symmetrical voice language with two transitive voices, as well as a ‘true passive’ voice. In this and other respects, WC Bajau resembles Malay/ Indonesian and Balinese (‘Indonesian-type’ languages) as opposed to the indigenous languages of Sabah and some Sama-Bajaw languages, which show greater resemblance to the ‘Philippine-type’ languages. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................... vii LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................. xxviii LIST OF TABLES................................................................................................................ xxix LIST OF MAPS .................................................................................................................... xxxi ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTATIONS ............................................................................. xxxii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION……….. ..................................................................................... 1 1.1 General background…...................................................................................... 1 1.1.1 The Sama-Bajaw: languages and origins.......................................... 1 1.1.2 The setting of the WC Bajau today: Sabah....................................... 4 1.1.3 The local setting: Kota Belud District.............................................. 6 1.1.3.1 Historical background.......................................................... 6 1.1.3.2 The WC Bajau and their neighbors..................................... 7 1.2 WC Bajau society and language use................................................................. 10 1.2.1 Kinship……..................................................................................... 10 1.2.2 Marriage and other social customs................................................... 11 1.2.3 Language use and language vitality.................................................. 12 1.3 The WC Bajau language ................................................................................... 14 1.3.1 Dialects……..................................................................................... 14 ix 1.3.2 Internal typology............................................................................... 16 1.3.2.1 ‘Philippine-type’ vs. ‘Indonesian-type’ languages............................................................................. 16 1.3.2.2 WC Bajau and other languages of Borneo........................... 18 1.3.3 Earlier research................................................................................. 21 1.3.4 WC Bajau literature and language development .............................. 22 1.4 Methodology, consultants, and corpus.............................................................. 24 1.5 Main features and organization of this grammar .............................................. 26 2. PHONOLOGY……………..................................................................................... 30 2.1 Introduction…………. ..................................................................................... 30 2.2 Phonemes……………...................................................................................... 30 2.2.1 Consonant phonemes........................................................................ 30 2.2.1.1 Consonant phonemes and their allophones.......................... 31 2.2.1.2 Phonemic contrasts.............................................................