A. Research Papers (Peer-Reviewed)

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    Papuan Malay – A Language of the Austronesian-Papuan Contact Zone
    (2021-02-03) Kluge, Angela
    This paper describes the contact features that Papuan Malay, an eastern Malay variety, situated in East Nusantara, the Austronesian-Papuan contact zone, displays under the influence of Papuan languages. This selection of features builds on previous studies that describe the different contact phenomena between Austronesian and non-Austronesian languages in East Nusantara. Four typical western Austronesian features that Papuan Malay is lacking or making only limited use of are examined in more detail: (1) the lack of a morphologically marked passive voice, (2) the lack of the clusivity distinction in personal pronouns, (3) the limited use of affixation, and (4) the limited use of the numeral-noun order. Also described in more detail are six typical Papuan features that have diffused to Papuan Malay: (1) the genitive-noun order rather than the noun-genitive order to express adnominal possession, (2) serial verb constructions, (3) clause chaining, and (4) tail-head linkage, as well as (5) the limited use of clause-final conjunctions, and (6) the optional use of the alienability distinction in nouns. This paper also briefly discusses whether the investigated features are also present in other eastern Malay varieties such as Ambon Malay, Maluku Malay and Manado Malay, and whether they are inherited from Proto-Austronesian, and more specifically from Proto-Malayic. By highlighting the unique features of Papuan Malay vis-à-vis the other East Nusantara Austronesian languages and placing the regional “adaptations” of Papuan Malay in a broader diachronic perspective, this paper also informs future research on Papuan Malay.
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    The Directionality of the Voicing Alternation in Tibetan
    (2021-02-03) Jacques, Guillaume
    This paper provides arguments in favor of the hypothesis that in two voice alternations in Tibetan (marking transitivity and TAME, respectively), the unvoiced form is primary, and its voiced counterpart the derived form. This hypothesis has consequences for the history of the voicing alternation in Trans-Himalayan in general, and also for the reconstruction of voiced affricates vs. fricatives in pre-Tibetan.
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    Anaphor Reconstruction in Thai Relative Clauses
    (2021-02-03) Chen, Yunchuan
    Whether an anaphor inside the head of relative clauses can take the embedded subject as its antecedent is commonly used to test the head derivation in relative clauses (e.g., Bhatt 2002; Schachter 1973). This paper used a truth value judgment experiment to investigate whether the anaphor tuaeng ‘self’ within the head noun phrase of Thai relative clauses can be bound by the embedded subject. The results suggested that such binding is prohibited, which further indicates that the head noun phrase of Thai relative clauses must be base-generated external to the modifying clause.
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    Decomposing Definiteness in Vietnamese
    (2021-02-03) Trang, Phan; Lam, Quang Dong
    This paper provides a detailed description of how Vietnamese encodes definiteness in the nominal phrase in the context of the crosslinguistic debate about the existence of lexical articles in classifier languages. We first show that so-called lexical determiners in Vietnamese are not genuine articles in the technical sense. We then scrutinize six different referring expressions in Vietnamese including bare nouns, classifier – nouns, numeral – classifier – nouns, plural – classifier – nouns, focus cái – classifier – nouns while pointing out how Vietnamese differs from other better-studied classifier languages. Based on this thorough investigation, we posit that Vietnamese systematically differentiates six levels of the givenness hierarchy in the sense of Gundel et al. (1993); therefore, Vietnamese contributes to a better understanding of the nature of definiteness and the structure of the nominal phrase.