Serial Verbs in Tetun Dili

Multilingua

Tetun Dili, an Austronesian language spoken in East Timor, was until 1999 primarily an oral language of intercultural communication. Since the 1999 vote on independence from Indonesia, Tetun Dili has become the dominant language of public life, including the government, education and the media, as well as becoming an official language alongside Portuguese, a former colonial language. The rapidly evolving press register of Tetun shows significant impact from language contact. Portuguese influence is seen primarily in extensive lexical borrowing, brought in by the Portuguese-educated elite as well as by translators and writers. Indonesian influence is seen in several calques for expressing anaphora, brought in by Indonesian-educated writers, and an adversative passive. Other new constructions, including a more general passive and final quote margins, have come about through the combined influence of Portuguese, Indonesian and English, the last as a source language for much literal tra...

2008

This paper analyzes reduplication and compounding in Tetun Dili. Reduplication, total or partial, is shown to be less productive in comparison to other Austronesian languages, but quite similar to that occurring in the Pacific pidgins and creoles, especially in those with an Austronesian substrate. Also discussed are the phonological factors involved in partial reduplication and the truncation of compounds.

2002

In M. Devos & J. van der Wal (eds.), Go and come off the beaten grammaticalization path, 165-184. Mouton de Gruyter 2014.

Oceanic Linguistics

Open letter, 2019

The recent paper on serial verbs by Martin Haspelmath (2016. 'The serial verb construction: comparative concept and cross-linguistic generalizations'. Language and Linguistics 17: 291-319) has caused concern to a fair number of linguists. Quite apart from attempting to re-characterize the category, the paper contains a number of factual inadequacies. Encouraged by our colleagues, we have written a straightforward letter to the editor of the journal Language and Linguistics, with a list of corrections.

2014

Domains where languages have two or more competing syntactic constructions expressing the same meaning may be problematic for bilingual heritage speakers. One such variable domain is the resultative constructions in heritage Ambon Malay, a variety spoken in the Netherlands by Dutch-Ambon Malay bilinguals. In Ambon Malay, resultatives are expressed mostly by means of verb serialization (SVC), although resultative prepositional phrases (PP) and adjectival phrases (AP) also occur. In Dutch, resultative constructions usually involve verb particles, PPs and APs. This overlap of structures poses the conditions for transfer effects between the two languages. The frequency distribution of SVCs, PPs and APs is investigated in semi-spontaneous speech from heritage speakers of Ambon Malay and compared to that of baseline speakers. Heritage speakers show an increase in the frequency of constructions shared by both languages (PPs and APs), while they underuse the constructions attested only in the heritage language (SVC).

Farklı dil ailelerinden gelmelerine rağmen birçok dünya dili birden fazla fiili birleştirerek dilbilimsel olarak bir cümlenin yüklemi yapma özelliğine sahiptir. Türkçede birleşik fiil dediğimiz bu yapılar dilbiliminde sıralı fiil yapısı, sıralı fiil, sıralama veya fiil sıralaması vb. terimleriyle de karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Bu yazıda, akrabalığı bulunmayan bazı dünya dillerindeki birleşik fiil yapılarına örnek verilmesinin yanında, özellikle Japoncadaki birleşik fiillerin yapısal ve anlamsal özellikleri üzerinde durulmaktadır. Japoncadaki yapılar anlatılırken Türkçedeki benzer yapılar da yapısal ve anlamsal olarak Japonca emsalleriyle kısaca mukayese edilmektedir. Bu mukayesenin amacı, Türk dilleri dışında dil öğrenen veya inceleyen kişilerin dikkatini başka dillerdeki benzer yapılara çekmektir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Renjookei formu, sıralı fiil, birleşik fiil, gerundium, aktivite/proses fiilleri, soyutlama, tasvir fiil

Paper presented at the 25th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, 25-26 October 2013