A grammar of Awtuw

The aim of this thesis is to describe the structure of the Awtuw language, spoken by about 400 people in the southern foothills of the Torricelli Mountains of northwestern Papua New Guinea. A brief preface presents my theoretical assumptions and methodological orientation. Language is viewed as a cultural phenomenon which, while by no means discrete from other facets of culture, has a distinct central focus that may be described independently without severe distortion. Grammatical classes and categories are isolated on the basis of language-internal morphosyntactic criteria and correlated with semantic functions. The introductory chapter places Awtuw in its geographical, cultural, and linguistic context, identifies the three dialects of Awtuw, and discusses the ubiquitous phenomenon of multilingualism in the Awtuw-speaking and surrounding area. Chapter 2 presents a brief description of Awtuw*s phonemes and formalizes the major morphophonological processes. Awtuw has eleven phonemic consonants and seven vowels isolated on the basis of minimal pairs. Morphophonemic rules simplify geminates and certain other consonant clusters, elide vowels, assimilate nasals to following stops, and insert epenthetic vowels. There are also a number of vowel harmony rules that assimilate affix vowels to stem vowels. Chapters 3 through 6 present an analysis of various morphosyntactic phenomena. Chapter 3 devises a number of formal identifying criteria which are used as binary features to analyze Awtuw* s parts-of-speech classes. Chapter 4 describes the structure of the verb complex and the categories represented by verbal affixes, and presents a xiv feature-based analysis of the Tense, Mood, and Aspect system. Chapter 5 begins with a discussion of grammatical relations, classifies verb roots on the basis of the case frames that they occur in, and correlates these classes with inherent aspect and other semantic categories. Chapter 6 describes the case-marking suffixes and their functions. Chapters 7 through 10 focus on aspects of Awtuw syntactic structure. Chapter 7 describes the structure of the Noun Phrase. Chapter 8 presents a classification of verbless predication types. Chapter 9 discusses a variety of operations on the clause, including question-formation, negation, reflexivization, and focusing of constituents. And Chapter 10 analyzes interpredicate and interclausal relations. It includes discussion of various types of verb serialization, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, conditionals, and coordinate constructions. Chapter 11 begins with an analysis of Awtuw kinship terminology and goes on to discuss color terminology, numeration and measurement, body part terminology, and the terms for major biological classes. Finally, Chapter 12 presents a brief description of a variety of paralinguistic phenomena. Abbreviations A Adjective NDB Negative Debitive AB Absent NF Nonfactive AGN Again NG Negative AP Adjective Phrase NOM Nominal CDL Conditional NP Noun Phrase CMP Comparative NPR Nonpresent DB Debitive 0 Object DES Desiderative OBL Obliviative DET Determiner P Past DH Downhill PCL Particle DS Downstream PF Perfect DU Dual PL Plural f Female POS Possessive NP FA Factive PRH Prohibitive FU Future PRO Pronoun HR Hortative PS Possessive I Instrumental/Commitative PT Potential I Intensifier Q Quantifier im(p ) Imperative RC Reciprocal INTER Interrogative S Clause constituent IP Imperfective s Singular L Locative/Directional SG Singular M T Motion TP Tok Pisin m Non-Female UH Uphill N Noun US Upstream V Vocative Other abbreviations are either listed at the beginning of relevant chapter or explained in the text. the Notational conventions // enclose phonemes [ j enclose phonetic transcriptions and feature specifications () enclose optional elements {] enclose optional specifications and expansions <> enclose keyed feature specifications (see pp. 25-26) enclose glosses — > 'becomes' or 'is rewritten as' / 'in the environment of' (also used to separate allomorphs and options in examples) > 'is higher on a hierarchy than' inflectional or derivational morpheme boundary + boundary between compounded elements * unacceptable ? of marginal or dubious acceptibility precedes a stressed syllable or indicates an elided vowel The canonical forms of verb roots are written in UPPER CASE characters. Note that I use the following orthographic conventions: