Morphosyntax of Sare

Abstract

This thesis provides a descriptive account of the previously undescribed Sare language, a Papuan language spoken by about 2,000 people in the middle Sepik River area of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. This thesis describes in particular the morphosyntactic aspects of the language.

The description begins by giving a general introduction to the language and its speakers in Chapter One. This chapter also describes the dialectal variation within the language, the sociocultural background of its speakers, the status of the language, and the general grammatical features of the language. Chapter Two describes the phonemic inventory and the phonological processes found in the language. Chapter Three introduces the various word classes, along with their subclasses, as a preliminary to the description of the morphology and syntax in the remaining chapters.

Chapter Four describes the morphology of nouns. It begins by describing the noun-deriving processes of suffixation, compounding and reduplication. There then follows a description of the inflectional processes of case-marking and the marking of number and gender. Chapter Five describes the structure of the noun phrase. The determiners that precede the head are described first, then the head slot and its exponents, followed by the nominal postmodifiers. There is then a description of complex noun phrases and appositive noun phrases. Chapter Six describes the morphology of the verb. The description begins with an account of verbal inflectional processes involving the subject marking of subjects, the tense-aspect-mood-marking system, negation, elevationals and directionals, and time-when constructions. This chapter concludes with an account of irregular verbs.

Chapter Seven and Eight are concerned with syntax. Simple sentences are described in Chapter Seven. We begin with an account of non-verbal sentences including copulative and extensive sentences. Verbal sentences are then described, including declaratives, imprecatives, caveat clauses, assertives, optatives and interrogatives. This chapter also includes a discussion of adverbs, serial verb constructions, derived clause types and the behaviour of non-core noun phrases. The final chapter describes complex sentences, beginning with coordinate constructions, followed by subordinate constructions. This chapter concludes with an account of complement constructions.