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Auxiliary fronting in Peranakan Javanese1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2008

PETER COLE ,
YURIE HARA  and
NGEE THAI YAP
PETER COLE*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware & Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
YURIE HARA*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Kyoto University
NGEE THAI YAP*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Universiti Putra Malaysia
*
Authors' addresses: (Cole) Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. E-mail: pcole@udel.edu
(Hara)Department of Linguistics, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Yoshida-honmachi Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8501Japan. E-mail: yhara@ling.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp
(Yap)Department of English, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia. E-mail: yap@fbmk.upm.edu.my
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Abstract

Peranakan Javanese (PNJ) is a relatively undescribed variety of Javanese spoken primarily by ethnic Chinese native speakers of Javanese in the city of Semarang in Central Java (Indonesia). PNJ makes a structural distinction between auxiliaries and main verbs. Auxiliaries are unique in that they undergo optional head movement to C. Not only do single auxiliaries move to C, as in familiar languages, but sequences of two or three auxiliaries can move to C as well. Significantly, the order of the moved auxiliaries is always the same as the order in their unmoved position. The distribution of auxiliaries in PNJ is predicted if a ‘tucking in’ (Richards 1997) analysis of head movement similar to that of Collins (2002) is adopted. The PNJ facts are of special interest not only because they are an example of an additional language/construction that shows the distribution expected on the basis of ‘tucking in’, but also because PNJ provides evidence that helps to distinguish between a head movement analysis and the ‘standard’ version of the remnant movement analysis, in which adverbs occupy fixed positions in the clause. It is quite difficult to distinguish between these approaches empirically, so the PNJ auxiliary facts are important in this regard.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 1 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

[1]

We would like to thank Ben Bruening, Chris Collins, David Gil, Gaby Hermon, Uri Tadmor, Yassir Tjung, Satoshi Tomioka, and, particularly, John Wolff for their very helpful suggestions about the analysis of Peranakan Javanese. Through his publications and his comments on our work, John made us aware of the uniqueness of Peranakan Javanese and the importance of distinguishing among the multitude of languages and dialects spoken throughout Indonesia. We would also like to express our thanks to the JL referees. We are appreciative of the effort that they put into helping us improve our paper. Special thanks are due to Yassir Tjung and Orin Gensler for helping us prepare the manuscript for publication. Both Yassir and Orin made many suggestions that were very helpful in making our arguments clear. This research was supported in part by the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and by the National Science Foundation (grant number BCS-0444649).

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