The Kemaloh Lun Bawang Language of Borneo

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is the Lun Bawang language (also called Lundayeh, and formerly also Murut), and in particular the Kemaloh dialect thereof, spoken principally in highland Borneo in the area near, and on all sides of, the borders dividing Malaysia’s Sarawak and Sabah and Indonesia’s Kalimantan Utara. The dissertation is based primarily on a combined total of six months of fieldwork, including the author’s learning to speak the language fluently, conducted mostly in and around Long Semadoh, on the headwaters of Sarawak’s Trusan River. It is supplemented by several additional months of studying locally published collections of transcribed oral literature. On these bases, it presents the most complete description of the language published anywhere to date, divided into three parts.Part I consists of two chapters. The first, the general introduction, provides necessary and useful background information for understanding the context in which the language is spoken. The second is a short ethnographic sketch of the Lun Bawang people covering a small handful of topics of historical and current interest. Special attention is paid to the dramatic changes they experienced during the mid-twentieth century, beginning shortly before the onset of World War II and intensifying after its conclusion. Part II, the core of the dissertation, which consists of eight chapters, is a grammatical description of all the major facets of the Lun Bawang language. Chapter 3 treats the language’s phonology, with special reference to the problem of diagnosing stress and the evidence used to do so. Chapter 4 discusses the language’s several word classes, often difficult to distinguish from one another, and their morphology, with verb morphology being the single largest topic of the chapter. Chapter 5 then treats of phrases smaller than a clause. Chapter 6, which presents monoclausal constructions, devotes much space to introducing and defining the notion of voice, the relationship between thematic roles such as agent and patient and the syntactic roles that they occupy such as subject, object, and pivot. Voice is of fundamental importance in assembling clauses, as it is connected to word order and agreement patterns, and, due to its role in determining which arguments may be targeted for certain syntactic operations, it will be especially critical in multiclausal constructions, as well. Chapter 7 analyzes Lun Bawang voice in finer detail, concluding that the language has a “symmetrical” voice system, one in which the respective voices do not substantially affect the hierarchical relations between arguments. Chapter 8 deals with five types of pragmatically marked structures: negation, questions, imperatives, clefting, and topicalization. Chapter 9 then takes up multiclausal constructions, most of which follow a strict principle for the selection of voice. Some of these constructions also illustrate significant generational divides in language use due to the increasing influence of Malay and, to a lesser extent, English among younger generations of speakers. Finally, Chapter 10 discusses a handful of phenomena that do not fit neatly into any of the above categories, including comparisons, modality, negative polarity, free choice items, and scope. Part III, consisting of a single large chapter, seeks to situate Lun Bawang in its genetic and areal context of some thirty-odd related dialects, the Dayic (variously also called Apo Duat or Apad Uat) languages. An attempt to draw clear linguistic boundaries in the highlands where these dialects are found meets with mixed success. Though several plainly or probably valid genetic groupings can be delineated, with some unusual, perhaps even unique, sound changes identified along the way, the attempt to clarify the picture further is ultimately frustrated by two factors. One is a series of overlapping isoglosses that cut across the few established genetic lines, and the second is the relative conservatism of the dialects on the highlands’ geographic periphery. From this murky picture, however, one fact is remarkable: with many Dayic dialects exhibiting manifold and sometimes dramatic innovations, Kemaloh Lun Bawang stands out for its conservatism. Although so many of its sisters and neighbors have developed atypical phonologies and moved toward a restructuring of the voice system, Kemaloh Lun Bawang has stood still by comparison and therefore is the most conservative dialect, not just among the Dayic languages, but anywhere on Borneo outside Sabah. The appendix presents and comments upon four types of traditional oral literature.