A descriptive grammar of the Pagu language

Abstract

Abstract of thesis entitled “A Descriptive Grammar of the Pagu Language” Submitted by Dalan Mehuli Perangin Angin

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in April 2018

This thesis mainly aims to produce a grammar of Pagu, a Non-Austronesian language spoken in North Halmahera, North Maluku province of eastern Indonesia. Other than describing its general structural areas including the phonology, morphology, nominal system, clause structure, clause linkage, possessive constructions, it also focuses on two specific linguistic phenomena of the language, viz: argument marking and grammatical relations. Furthermore, it also aims to help document the language and provide a source for the Pagu community to produce teaching materials for formal students in developing a language/culture revitalization program. This thesis follows the “escaping eurocentrism” approach (Gil 2001). It suggests that the knowledge of European languages restricts researchers to recognize characteristics of non-European languages. By following this non-eurocentric approach, the author was able to describe the language following its own characteristics, rather than restricting himself with the ‘conventional’ way of describing a language (that is likely influenced by the European languages’ features). For example, readers will note that the suffix -oka to have a three-way semantic marker for spatial, temporal information, and tense (note that a ‘tense’ marker in European languages is unlikely to function also as a spatial marker). The previous researcher (Wimbish 1991) describes –oka as a tense marker only e.g. oyom-oka ‘eat-there’ (an eating-event that happens at a certain time in the past). In Pagu, -oka actually also marks a place (spatial marker) e.g. wola-oka ‘house-there’ and also a temporal marker e.g. Jumat-oka ‘Friday-there’. The suffix in those three usages is the same distal morpheme, literally means ‘at-there’ – it marks two different realms: spatial and temporal (including tense) identically. Thus, -oka must be treated accordingly in its three-way function. This approach also allows for a different description of Pagu argument marking i.e. the system that determines: (i) which pronominal prefix must attach to a predicate (a ‘subject’ or ‘object’ prefix) and (ii) which argument of the predicate the pronominal prefix(es) cross-references/agrees with. ‘Conventionally’, based on the linguistic tradition, one will examine and account for the issue by studying how the syntax controls it, and whether it is influenced by the semantics or the syntax-semantics interface. This thesis discusses six different factors that determine argument markings in Pagu: involving the (morpho-)syntax, semantics, pragmatics or some combinations thereof. One of them is the pragmatic-semantic factor: ‘semantics’ because the marking aims only at Undergoer argument of statives such as ‘hungry’ or ‘shy’; ‘pragmatics’ because based on the perspective of the speaker the Undergoer can be perceived differently, i.e. as a sufferer (someone who suffers from experiencing/undergoing the event/state) or non-sufferer. In order to express the former, the argument must be marked with an object prefix, and the latter with a subject prefix. In this grammar, readers will find about a dozen more such ‘peculiar’ cases of features and structures in Pagu in various structural areas.

(498 words)