Voice and Valency in Amarasi: Topics in Synchronic and Diachronic Morphosyntax

Abstract

This dissertation is a detailed investigation into the morphosyntax of Amarasi (ISO: aaz), an Austronesian language of West Timor, Indonesia. It focuses on the various subsystems of voice, valency, and agreement within the language from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, with the goals of i) deepening our empirical understanding of the language and its historical development as a member of the understudied Timoric sub-branch of Malayo-Polynesian, and ii) investigating a range of theoretical questions regarding the cross-linguistic typology of voice and its interaction with the synchronic representation and diachronic innovation of inflection classes, valency- and category-changing derivation, and case marking.

Drawing on a combination of collaborative in-person fieldwork, remote elicitation, primary literature, and archival sources, this dissertation presents a number of novel hypotheses regarding the grammar and historical trajectory of Amarasi. Firstly, it argues that the language's semi-idiosyncratic distribution of prefixal subject agreement is the result of the epiphenomenal interaction between syntactio-structural representations of argument structure (as involving distinct flavours of Voice originating from earlier causative morphology) and regular phonotactic restrictions. Furthermore, careful investigation demonstrates that an analysis based on inflection class and diacritic features is in fact insufficient for capturing the distribution of prefixal agreement sets as found with cross-categorial derivation.

Secondly, this dissertation illustrates a cross-linguistically unique manifestation of non-active voice in Amarasi in the form of a semantically-agentive but syntactically-unaccusative functional head which is ungrammatical in the absence of overt existential closure (as introduced by nominalisation or reciprocalisation), resulting in the availability of property nouns alongside an absence of corresponding property/"passive" verbs. Thirdly, this dissertation explores the synchronic representation and diachronic origin of both inherited and innovated applicative/causative morphology in the language, proposing that the latter is the result of the morphologisation of once-transparent phonological epenthesis. Finally, this dissertation identifies for the first time a dative case in Amarasi as marked by a typologically-unusual "ditropic" enclitic which forms a prosodic word with a host on its left despite case-marking a nominal on its right, presenting a novel decompositional analysis of the nominative and oblique pronominal paradigms in the language as based on (weak) case containment and the historical repurposing of genitive affixes/clitics.

In containing a brief sketch of the grammar of Amarasi as well as a small number of fully-glossed and translated texts spanning various genres and sub-dialects, it is also hoped that this dissertation provides a solid empirical basis for further investigation into not only Amarasi itself but also other related languages of West Timor from a comparative perspective.