A Grammar of Lamaholot, Eastern Indonesia
The Morphology and Syntax of the Lewoingu Dialect
Kunio Nishiyama & Herman Kelen
Ibaraki University; University of Hawaii
This book describes a grammar (mainly morphology and syntax) of the Lewoingu dialect of Lamaholot, an Austronesian language (Central-Malayo-Polynesian subgroup) spoken by 150,000 ~ 200,000 people on the eastern tip of Flores and the surrounding area in eastern Indonesia. Lamaholot has 35 dialects, and although there are some descriptions and dictionaries for other dialects, the Lewoingu dialect has never been described before. The description in this book is basically theory-neutral, and analyses are kept to a minimum. This work will be of interest to descriptive linguists and Austronesian specialists, in particular because languages of eastern Indonesia in general are poorly documented and relations of several dialects of Lamaholot are poorly understood. Typologists and theoretical linguists would be interested in unique agreement in Lamaholot, where agreement emerges not only on verbs and adjectives, but also on adverbs, numerals, a preposition, and even on the conjunction (‘and’).
Theoreticians will also be interested in the chapter on resumptive pronouns, which is a rare description of the phenomena in Austronesian languages and shows that Lamaholot basically shares general properties of resumptive pronouns found in Irish and Semitic languages. Also of interest are possessive constructions, where the possessor can be either pronominal or postnominal, and each other has peculiar constraints.
ISBN 9783895867149. Languages of the World/Materials 467. 188pp. 2007.
