Biak morphosyntax
This thesis is a general description of the morphology and syntax of the Biak language. The Biak language belongs to the West New Guinea subgroup of the Austronesian language family and is spoken by around 50,000 to 70,000 speakers in West Papua in the northern part of the Geelvink Bay. The thesis consists of 7 main chapters that cover demographic and ethnographic information of the language, morphology, grammatical categories, basic constituent order, noun compounding and denominalization, relative clauses, and predicate nominal constructions. The main findings of the thesis are: âą The Biak language is predominantly a head-initial language. âą The Biak language has morphological variation from monomorphemic to polymorphemic with the polymorphemic being the dominant pattern in the language. âą Inflectional patterns on verbal and prepositional predicates, demonstratives, and possessive pronouns are divided into two patterns: the consonantal pattern and the vocal pattern. âą Biak has alienable and inalienable nouns. Alienability in Biak is a syntactic distinction, not exactly corresponding to the semantic distinction. âą The basic constituent order is SVO or AVP. Variations occur with predicate nominal
Mofu, Suriel Semuel
Linguistics ; Biak language ; morphology ; syntax
Biak morphosyntax. This thesis is a general description of the morphology and syntax of the Biak language. The Biak language belongs to the West New Guinea subgroup of the Austronesian language family and is spoken by around 50,000 to 70,000 speakers in West Papua in the northern part of the Geelvink Bay. The thesis consists of 7 main chapters that cover demographic and ethnographic information of the language, morphology, grammatical categories, basic constituent order, noun compounding and denominalization, relative clauses, and predicate nominal constructions. The main findings of the thesis are: âą The Biak language is predominantly a head-initial language. âą The Biak language has morphological variation from monomorphemic to polymorphemic with the polymorphemic being the dominant pattern in the language. âą Inflectional patterns on verbal and prepositional predicates, demonstratives, and possessive pronouns are divided into two patterns: the consonantal pattern and the vocal pattern. âą Biak has alienable and inalienable nouns. Alienability in Biak is a syntactic distinction, not exactly corresponding to the semantic distinction. âą The basic constituent order is SVO or AVP. Variations occur with predicate nominal
morphosyntax general description morphology_syntax language language belongs west new subgroup language family speak speaker west northern part consist main cover demographic ethnographic information language morphology grammatical_category basic constituent order noun compound relative_clause predicate nominal construction main_finding language predominantly head initial language language morphological_variation dominant pattern language inflectional pattern verbal prepositional predicate demonstrative possessive pronoun divide_two pattern consonantal pattern vocal pattern noun syntactic distinction exactly correspond semantic distinction basic constituent order svo variations occur predicate nominal