A grammar of Solor – Lamaholot: a language of Flores, Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

This study is a grammatical description of an endangered language of eastern Indonesia called Lamaholot, spoken on the eastern part of Flores, and three neighboring small islands, Solor, Adonara and Lembata. The study focuses on the Solor dialect spoken over the entire Solor Island by about 20,000 people residing in 33 villages. The data for this study were collected from the native speakers in Karawatung village in three periods, each lasting for at least three months, through audio-video recording, elicitation and written document gathering. The language has a relatively simple phonological system. It has 16 native and 3 loan consonants, and 6 basic vowel qualities, where every oral vowel has a corresponding nasal vowel. It is an analytic language yet has a quite laborious morphological system because one form may signal different meanings. In clausal structures, there are mostly one-to-one corresponding between words and morphemes. Most bound morphemes are derivational and a few are inflectional affixes. The most important verbal affixes are clitics marking S or A arguments. Major word classes include nouns, verbs and adjectives. Adjectives share some identical properties with the other two classes; which is why some previous studies have hardly distinguished adjectives from nouns and verbs. The language has a Nominative-Accusative grammar system, with a fixed word order of SV(O). Phrases follow a modified-modifier pattern. Nearly all NPs in the Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977) are relativizeable, except the object of comparison. The language has verbless and verbal clauses. It also has serial verb constructions used: (i) to encode oblique relations which, in non-serializing languages such as English, are expressed with prepositions; and (ii) to express secondary verbal concepts, which, for example in English, are modals and aspectual modifiers. Two prominent grammatical relations were discovered: Subjects and Objects. Objects are distinguished into two: a Primary Object that is the argument that comes immediately after a clause verbal predicate regardless of whether it is a direct or an indirect object, and a Secondary Object, which occurs farther away from the clause verb. The verbs in a serial verb construction mostly share the same subject argument, but the second verb may have its own additional argument which seems morphosyntactically like an object but is pragmatically an oblique. SL has some valence change operations including middle voice, reflexive and reciprocal, inverse, applicative and causative. Inverse constructions can only be translated into English as a passive clause, yet they are not passive in SL. Two distinct syntactic structures referred to here as subject prominent and topic prominent constructions may be considered as an active – passive counterpart in SL in an analysis following Shibatani (2006). With this perspective, SL can be assumed to have a passive system without passive morphology as is reported in some languages on Flores (Arka 2009).