Abstract
This thesis is an introduction to Duna, a language spoken by approximately 25,000 people living in Southern Highlands Province in Papua New Guinea. Duna (also known as Yuna) is classified as a member of the Duna-Bogaya subgroup of the Trans New Guinea family. This study is primarily based on work with Duna speakers of the Lake Kopiago region.
The thesis provides a basic treatment of phonology, describes the structure of simple sentences, and examines in detail the expression of epistemic assessment (the treatment of a proposition as representing knowledge), a semantic domain that is richly encoded by bound morphemes in the language.
Chapter 1 gives background information concerning the Duna lands, people,
and language situation. It also describes previous work that has been done on the language, and the nature and sources of the data used in this study.
Chapter 2 includes an overview of Duna segmental phonology and gives an
account of citation tone contrasts in monomorphemic words.
Chapter 3 oudines Duna word classes, including large open lexical classes such as nouns, and smaller closed grammatical classes such as demonstratives.
Chapter 4 deals with the structure of the basic clause, describing the different clause types and outlining dominant and pragmatically marked word orders. Nouns and NP structure are treated in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 details NP marking that encodes epistemic positioning, specificity, pairhood, grouphood, semantic role, grammatical relation, and discourse or pragmatic prominence.
Chapter 7 analyses complex predicates, for example, those that are composed of a verb and a verb adjunct, or of several verbs in series.
The remainder of the thesis focusses on bound morphemes that are added to
the predicate of a final clause. Chapter 8 treats markers which specify features of the denoted situation in terms of time or event modality. Chapters 9 and 10 describe evidential markers, information status markers, and epistemic particles, morphemes which attach to a final predicate to express an epistemic assessment of the proposition.
Chapter 11 describes the formal and functional features of Duna sentence types and discusses typical implications that certain predicate markers have concerning a speaker's or addressee's relationship to the denoted situation.
The thesis provides a basic treatment of phonology, describes the structure of simple sentences, and examines in detail the expression of epistemic assessment (the treatment of a proposition as representing knowledge), a semantic domain that is richly encoded by bound morphemes in the language.
Chapter 1 gives background information concerning the Duna lands, people,
and language situation. It also describes previous work that has been done on the language, and the nature and sources of the data used in this study.
Chapter 2 includes an overview of Duna segmental phonology and gives an
account of citation tone contrasts in monomorphemic words.
Chapter 3 oudines Duna word classes, including large open lexical classes such as nouns, and smaller closed grammatical classes such as demonstratives.
Chapter 4 deals with the structure of the basic clause, describing the different clause types and outlining dominant and pragmatically marked word orders. Nouns and NP structure are treated in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 details NP marking that encodes epistemic positioning, specificity, pairhood, grouphood, semantic role, grammatical relation, and discourse or pragmatic prominence.
Chapter 7 analyses complex predicates, for example, those that are composed of a verb and a verb adjunct, or of several verbs in series.
The remainder of the thesis focusses on bound morphemes that are added to
the predicate of a final clause. Chapter 8 treats markers which specify features of the denoted situation in terms of time or event modality. Chapters 9 and 10 describe evidential markers, information status markers, and epistemic particles, morphemes which attach to a final predicate to express an epistemic assessment of the proposition.
Chapter 11 describes the formal and functional features of Duna sentence types and discusses typical implications that certain predicate markers have concerning a speaker's or addressee's relationship to the denoted situation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Qualification | Master of Philosophy |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Award date | 12 Jul 2009 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2008 |
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