- Title
- Object verbs: link from Timor-Alor-Pantar to Trans-New-Guinea: an exploration of their typological and historical implications
- Creator
- Windschuttel, Glenn Alan
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- 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.
- Subject
- object verbs; New-Guinea; Timor; Alor; Pantar; language; subject agreement; semantics
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1404460
- Identifier
- uon:35345
- Rights
- Copyright 2019 Glenn Alan Windschuttel
- Language
- eng
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