A Reference Grammar of Puyuma: An Austronesian Language of Taiwan

Puyuma clauses are predicate-initial. A distinction between actor voice (with actor subject) and undergoer voice (with undergoer subject) is made among verbal clauses with both actor and undergoer arguments. The definiteness of the undergoer is an important factor in determining the manifestation of voice in independent clauses. Actor voice clauses are intransitive and are marked no differently from other intransitives, but they have a patient in oblique case. Undergoer voice clauses are always transitive, and the actor is obligatorily marked on verb as genitive pronominal proclitic, but the actor NP with which it agrees (if any) is marked as oblique. Thus Puyuma can be said to have an ergative syntactic organisation in independent clauses. However, complex constructions display accusative properties. Undergoer voice has three variants, transitive 1 (TR1), transitive 2 (TR2), transitive 3 (TR3), according to the semantic role of the undergoer. These correspond to the Patient Voice (PV), Locative Voice (LV), Instrumental/Beneficiary (Conveyance) Voice (I/BV or CV) of conventional Philippinist terminology. This thesis consists of sixteen chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the language and gives a brief review of the previous studies regarding this language. Chapter 2 describes the phonetics and phonology. Chapter 3 deals with the morphological units and various word formation processes. An overview of Puyuma lexical categories is given in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 analyses Puyuma noun phrase structure. Chapter 6 describes verbal categories, including voice, aspect and mood, and treats morphological classes of intransitive verbs. Chapter 7 deals with transcategorial operations, including verbalisation and nominalisation. Chapter 8 examines the transitivity and argument structure of Puyuma verbal clauses. Re-encoding of arguments is dealt with in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 provides a discussion of Puyuma clause types. Negative constructions are described in Chapter 11. Chapter 12 treats non-declarative clause types, including imperatives, interrogatives and hortatives. Chapter 13 deals with serial verb constructions. Chapter 14 describes complement clauses and Chapter 15 adverbial clauses. Finally, coordinate constructions are treated in Chapter 16.