On the syntax of West Kalimantan: Asymmetries and A'-movement in Malayic and Land Dayak languages

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on five Malayic and five Land Dayak languages of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, exploring voice, A’-movement, and extraction asymmetries through a Minimalist framework. The main goal of this dissertation is to bridge the gap between documentation and syntactic analysis in a few ways: a) by using data from all underdocumented, and several undocumented languages; b) by providing syntactically motivated description of ten different languages; and c) by using contemporary syntactic principles, Case licensing and Phase Theory, to explain microvariation found in the voice system of these ten languages. Specifically, I offer an analysis of voice in West Kalimantan that typologically separates Malayic and Land Dayak languages, by showing that Malayic languages have a three 'voice' system, while Land Dayak languages only have a two 'voice' system. This dissertation further expands upon previous analyses of the Austronesian nasal prefix, by presenting data from never before studied languages where the nasal prefix (generally analyzed as an actor voice morpheme) and undergoer voice prefix can co-occur. I also argue that the nasal prefix differs in function between the two subgroups. I further discuss the lack of extraction asymmetries so common to Western Austronesian languages in a few Land Dayak languages through an exploration of both wh-movement and relative clauses.