Bound pronominals in West Barito languages

Abstract

This paper describes and discusses multifunctional bound pronominals in Ngaju and Dohoi, West Barito languages in Central Kalimantan (Austronesian languages in Borneo), on the basis of published descriptive materials and the present author’s fieldnotes. Some morphological descriptions on bound pronominals can be found in Hardeland (1858) for Ngaju, and in Inagaki (2008) for Dohoi, but no study to date has sufficiently explored the agreement phenomena of bound pronominals in these languages. First, this paper provides a description on the Ngaju pronominal forms and their behaviors, which supplements to Hardeland’s (1858) descriptions. Second, it is claimed that the Dohoi first singular pronominal suffix -kku has morpho-phonologically reduced from the Proto Malayo-Polynesian *ni-ku/*n(a)ku ‘1SG.GEN’ and it has been reanalyzed as consisting of -k and the detachable ku. Third, this paper demonstrates that in some cases Ngaju and Dohoi show the “systematic covariance” (Steele 1978) in person-number between bound pronominals and their controllers (= subjects), and concludes that at least the Dohoi subject pronominal suffixes can be seen as more canonical agreement markers rather than “ambiguous agreement markers” (Siewierska 2004) on the basis of the evidence of their multiple occurrence within the domain of clause.