A grammar of western Subanon

College

Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC College of Education

Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Date

10-2-2020

Abstract

This dissertation is a grammatical description of Subanon (also known as Western Subanon or Siocon Subanon, ISO 639-3 suc), a highly endangered Austronesian language with about 125,000 speakers living on the Zamboanga Peninsula in the Philippines. This dissertation is the first ever comprehensive description of the language and the first to be accompanied by a documentary corpus. Topics addressed include the sound system, word classes, morphosyntactic properties of verbal clauses, clause combination, serial verb construction, interrogative and imperative structures, ellipsis, scope, verbless clauses, discourse markers, numerals, reduplications, metaphors, idioms, euphemisms, onomatopoeias, and anger words. Research for this dissertation is based on first-hand field work conducted in the region of Malayal, supplemented by my own native-speaker knowledge of the language. All data collected for this research—including recordings, transcriptions and annotation files—are accessible via the Kaipuleohone Digital Ethnographic Archive at the University of Hawaiʻi. In addition to its contribution to the scientific understanding of human language, this dissertation and accompanying corpus of recordings provide a means of preserving the language for the next generations of speakers and of facilitating the development of curriculum and instructional materials to teach the language in the Subanon communities in Zamboanga. It is my hope that this grammar will not only be useful for linguists and the Subanon people, but also for other people who have an interest in saving endangered languages in the world.

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Disciplines

South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies

Keywords

Subanun language; Western Subanon dialect

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