Books by Rik De Busser
Language Structure and Environment is a broad introduction to how languages are shaped by their e... more Language Structure and Environment is a broad introduction to how languages are shaped by their environment. It makes the argument that the social, cultural, and natural environment of speakers influences the structures and development of the languages they speak. After a general overview, the contributors explain in a number of detailed case studies how specific cultural, societal, geographical, evolutionary and meta-linguistic pressures determine the development of specific grammatical features and the global structure of a varied selection of languages. This is a work of meticulous scholarship at the forefront of a burgeoning field of linguistics.
The Bunun language is spoken by one of the thirteen officially recognized Austronesian minority g... more The Bunun language is spoken by one of the thirteen officially recognized Austronesian minority groups on the island of Taiwan. Its most marked characteristics are its complex verbal morphology and its unusual argument alignment system. Takivatan Bunun is the third-largest of its five extant dialects and is spoken by a number of small settlements two counties in the central mountains and at the east coast of the island.
Based on more than one year of field work data, this dissertation explores aspects of the grammar of Takivatan as spoken by the people of the villages Ma-yuan and Qi-mei in Hualien County. It is intended as a preliminary to a full descriptive grammar. After an introductory chapter and an overview of Takivatan phonology, Chapter 3 discusses how words and affixes can be defined in Takivatan and gives a general overview of word building processes. Chapter 4 is a concise treatment of compounding, an uncommon and unproblematic process in Takivatan. Chapter 5 discusses TAM affixes. Chapter 6 concisely describes the grammatical and derivational uses of focus suffixes. Chapter 7 is an elaborate discussion and classification of the large set of verbal prefixes in Takivatan. The final chapter concludes with an overview of definiteness markers, personal pronouns, demonstratives and other pronominal forms.
The 2009 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society Conference was held at La Trobe Universi... more The 2009 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society Conference was held at La Trobe University from 9 to 11 July 2009 and was co-hosted by the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology and the Linguistics Program.
Thirty-six papers presented at the conference were submitted for these proceedings, of which twenty-one were accepted for publication after an anonymous peer review. Papers were anonymously reviewed by at least two academic referees to DIISR standards and a majority of papers were reviewed by experts at overseas universities. The review process for the proceedings was separate from and in addition to that of the conference abstracts. We are grateful to all referees for their meticulous work and their constructive comments. We are especially indebted to Joanne Taylor for her invaluable expertise in all stages of the editing process.
Book chapters by Rik De Busser
Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages, 2018
This chapter investigates how referential expressions are involved in establishing and maintainin... more This chapter investigates how referential expressions are involved in establishing and maintaining textual cohesion in Bunun, an Austronesian language of Taiwan, and how this behaviour varies across genres. Relying on a model of referential cohesion inspired by systemic-functional grammar, it explores differences and similarities for encoding referential continuity across sentence boundaries in oral and narrative text. It concludes that, contrary to initial expectation, and despite considerable formal differences in how referential expressions are realized, at a more fundamental level the properties of referential cohesion are unexpectedly stable across genres.
This book is an attempt to give an overview of how language interacts with its environment, or be... more This book is an attempt to give an overview of how language interacts with its environment, or better, how actual linguistic structure is formed, changed and influenced by different aspects of the human environment. The focus is mainly on effects of the extra-linguistic environment on the actual grammatical structure of languages; we will leave influences on other linguistic subsystems such as phonology, the lexicon, and discourse structure to the efforts of other researchers.
The underlying assumption of this entire volume is that linguistic structure is not only shaped by how speakers interact with each other and with the world they live in, but also by external forces that are outside the control of individual speakers or speech communities. One might call it natural selection in grammar, were it not for the fact that it is not entirely clear whether biological and linguistic change operate along the same real-world principles, or whether any correspondences are much more superficial.
Papers by Rik De Busser
International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 2019
This paper discusses two major ways in which the introduction of Christianity exerted an importan... more This paper discusses two major ways in which the introduction of Christianity exerted an important influence on the Bunun language. In the second half of the twentieth century, Christian churches were instrumental in the protection of indigenous languages, including Bunun, against the cultural and linguistic unification policies of the Taiwanese government. In a different way, work on Bible translation in Bunun has resulted in the creation of a pan-dialectal religious vocabulary and led to the creation of a de facto standard variant of the language based on the Isbukun dialect. Today, a complex relationship exists between this written standard and other Bunun dialects.
Oceanic Linguistics, 2017
Spatial deixis in Takivatan Bunun has not developed specialized functions that allow it to refer ... more Spatial deixis in Takivatan Bunun has not developed specialized functions that allow it to refer back to referents or propositions in discourse (textual use), without pointing to an external spatial or temporal context (situational use). This challenges established accounts of deixis, which assume that both situational and textual uses are universal or that the former use is a diachronic precedent to the latter. Based on two concepts of functional grammar, cohesion and layering, the present article offers the alternative analysis that Takivatan Bunun demonstratives and related forms fulfill a spatial deictic function while simultaneously being involved in establishing textual cohesion through phoric reference. INTER say-EVT.DIST father M.-ENT.MED shoot NEG COMP be.allowed.to 'But Maia's father said that we could not go shooting.' c. dusa-in sam Tiaŋ-ta two-PFV 1E.TOP.AG 4 T.-ENT.DIST '... and then there was only (that) Tiang and me.' Deixis has received a fair amount of attention in various subgroups of Austronesian languages; two works offering a broad overview, mainly of languages in the Eastern Pacific, are Senft (1997) for Austronesian and Papuan languages and Senft (2004) for Oceanic languages. Most studies on Austronesian languages focus on various aspects of the situational use of demonstratives, that is, their function in encoding spatial (and by extension temporal) reference. This is understandable, because cross-linguistically demonstratives are often considered prototypical deictics and their situational function is generally regarded as their most basic function. From an evolutionary and a developmental viewpoint, the primacy of the exophoric situational use of deixis makes a lot of sense: it is widely assumed that the evolutionary origin of demonstratives is exophoric situational use (for instance, Halliday 1994:312), and there is some evidence that this pointing use is also prior in first language acquisition (Clark 1978). Diessel takes this a step further, arguing that situational use is diachronically the primary use of demonstratives and "that anaphoric and discourse deictic demonstratives are already to some extent grammaticalized" from this primary situational function (Diessel 1999a:20). Himmelmann (1996) takes a rather different perspective. He argues that, since phoric and discourse uses of demonstratives seem to be as good as universal cross-linguistically, there is little evidence for the functional primacy of situational over text-oriented deixis. On the contrary, he seems to suggest that discourse deixis (which refers back to a text segment; see 3.1) is the unmarked use for free demonstrative forms (Himmelmann 1996:225). Both Himmelmann's and Diessel's positions are to some extent problematic for the analysis of deixis in Takivatan Bunun, because in this language "the distance dimension in any of the deictic paradigms is rarely used unambiguously for anaphoric reference" 3. Unless indicated, the Takivatan Bunun examples in this article are from the 27,000 word corpus of Takivatan Bunun, collected by the author between 2005 and 2011. The main body of the corpus consists of ten narrative and expository texts, ranging from 5m 36s to 49m 20s in length. These are supplemented by ten sets of elicited example sentences. Care was taken to avoid translation elicitation and response bias. Initial capitals and final periods are not used in the Takivatan sentences, as is normal in Formosan linguistics. Abbreviations that do not follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules are: 1E, first person exclusive; 1I, first person inclusive; ACT, actor; AG, agent form of the personal pronoun; ANAPH, anaphoric marker; ASSOC, associative; CONS, consequence; CV, CV-reduplication; DEFIN, definitional marker; DYN, dynamic; EMO, emotive marker; ENT, entitative; EVT, eventive; EXIST, existential; FILL, filler; GIV, given; GNR, generic; HI.AG, high agency; INCH, inchoative; INTENS, intensifying; INTER, interjection; LF, locative focus; LNK, linker; LOC, locative; MED, medial; N, neutral form of the personal pronoun; NVIS, nonvisual; P, plural; PAUC, paucal; PERSON , person nominalization; PM, predicate marker; PN, proper noun marker; PRT, particle; RES-OBJ, resultative object; S, singular; SPEC, specific article; STAT, stative; SUBORD, subordinator; TOP, topical form of the personal pronoun; TRANSFER, transfer; UF, undergoer focus. Abbreviations used in cohesion analysis: Rc, reference; Rt, referent; Ta, target; Tn, n-th link in a cohesive chain. 4. The label TOP is here used to refer to the clause-internal topic that is targeted by voice-related verbal affixes (see De Busser 2011).
Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts, 2015
ABSTRACT This book is an attempt to give an overview of how language interacts with its environme... more ABSTRACT This book is an attempt to give an overview of how language interacts with its environment, or better, how actual linguistic structure is formed, changed and influenced by different aspects of the human environment. The focus is mainly on effects of the extra-linguistic environment on the actual grammatical structure of languages; we will leave influences on other linguistic subsystems such as phonology, the lexicon, and discourse structure to the efforts of other researchers.The underlying assumption of this entire volume is that linguistic structure is not only shaped by how speakers interact with each other and with the world they live in, but also by external forces that are outside the control of individual speakers or speech communities. One might call it natural selection in grammar, were it not for the fact that it is not entirely clear whether biological and linguistic change operate along the same real-world principles, or whether any correspondences are much more superficial.
Studies in Language, 2011
This article describes the morphological and syntactic mechanisms that are involved in the overt ... more This article describes the morphological and syntactic mechanisms that are involved in the overt and covert realisation of core arguments in Takivatan Bunun. It argues that the interactions between these mechanisms make it difficult to explain Takivatan predicate-argument structure in terms of traditional notions of transitivity and argument alignment. As an alternative, it proposes that argument alignment in Takivatan is realised through the interaction of a number of relatively independent linguistic subsystems.
This chapter investigates how referential expressions are involved in establishing and main-<b... more This chapter investigates how referential expressions are involved in establishing and main-<br> taining textual cohesion in Bunun, an Austronesian language of Taiwan, and how this be-<br> haviour varies across genres. Relying on a model of referential cohesion inspired by sys-<br> temic-functional grammar, it explores differences and similarities for encoding referential<br> continuity across sentence boundaries in oral and narrative text. It concludes that, contrary<br> to initial expectation, and despite considerable formal differences in how referential expres-<br> sions are realized, at a more fundamental level the properties of referential cohesion are<br> unexpectedly stable across genres.
Summarizing document texts at various levels of detail is required for many information selection... more Summarizing document texts at various levels of detail is required for many information selection tasks. For instance, when loading and visualizing documents on small screens of handheld devices, it is important to be able to dynamically compress texts. In this article we discuss a technique of generating hierarchical topic trees of a text and to use them in various ways to build summaries of a flexible length. For the topic tree building process we have implemented both a deterministic and probabilistic approach. We compare the results when the topic tree is used for automatic summarization.
This talk will give an overview of the various grammatical mechanisms in Takivatan Bunun that are... more This talk will give an overview of the various grammatical mechanisms in Takivatan Bunun that are involved in the realization of topicality and topic continuity. I will argue that such an account needs to allow for the occurrence of multiple topics per clause. Takivatan is typologically uncommon in that it allows for the deletion of almost all elements in a clause, both free and bound, that can be recovered from the discourse context, with the exception of the verbal root and some associated bound morphemes. Section 4 will discuss the role that the non-expression of information plays in the realization of topical and non-topical information.
Having the experience of last year, this year we paid special attention to the preprocessing part... more Having the experience of last year, this year we paid special attention to the preprocessing part. We tried to determine corpus-independent rules for cleaning the text. We only retained the text between <TEXT> tags and split it into sentences with the sentence splitter provided at ...
Takivatan Bunun, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, has a dedicated class of words expres... more Takivatan Bunun, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, has a dedicated class of words expressing time, place and manner. These words are interesting because of their considerable positional and grammatical variation. This talk will focus on a number of relatively common time words: (tu)dip 'then', qabas 'in the old days', laupa(ku) 'now', and haip 'today'. It gives an overview of the clausal slots in which these words occur and their associated behaviours. I will present a number of explanations for this unusual positional and associated grammatical variation. I will suggest that variation in the position and grammatical behaviour of Takivatan time words is likely connected to a number of functional and historical factors that might be common to many Austronesian languages of Taiwan.
Uploads
Books by Rik De Busser
Based on more than one year of field work data, this dissertation explores aspects of the grammar of Takivatan as spoken by the people of the villages Ma-yuan and Qi-mei in Hualien County. It is intended as a preliminary to a full descriptive grammar. After an introductory chapter and an overview of Takivatan phonology, Chapter 3 discusses how words and affixes can be defined in Takivatan and gives a general overview of word building processes. Chapter 4 is a concise treatment of compounding, an uncommon and unproblematic process in Takivatan. Chapter 5 discusses TAM affixes. Chapter 6 concisely describes the grammatical and derivational uses of focus suffixes. Chapter 7 is an elaborate discussion and classification of the large set of verbal prefixes in Takivatan. The final chapter concludes with an overview of definiteness markers, personal pronouns, demonstratives and other pronominal forms.
Thirty-six papers presented at the conference were submitted for these proceedings, of which twenty-one were accepted for publication after an anonymous peer review. Papers were anonymously reviewed by at least two academic referees to DIISR standards and a majority of papers were reviewed by experts at overseas universities. The review process for the proceedings was separate from and in addition to that of the conference abstracts. We are grateful to all referees for their meticulous work and their constructive comments. We are especially indebted to Joanne Taylor for her invaluable expertise in all stages of the editing process.
Book chapters by Rik De Busser
The underlying assumption of this entire volume is that linguistic structure is not only shaped by how speakers interact with each other and with the world they live in, but also by external forces that are outside the control of individual speakers or speech communities. One might call it natural selection in grammar, were it not for the fact that it is not entirely clear whether biological and linguistic change operate along the same real-world principles, or whether any correspondences are much more superficial.
Papers by Rik De Busser
Based on more than one year of field work data, this dissertation explores aspects of the grammar of Takivatan as spoken by the people of the villages Ma-yuan and Qi-mei in Hualien County. It is intended as a preliminary to a full descriptive grammar. After an introductory chapter and an overview of Takivatan phonology, Chapter 3 discusses how words and affixes can be defined in Takivatan and gives a general overview of word building processes. Chapter 4 is a concise treatment of compounding, an uncommon and unproblematic process in Takivatan. Chapter 5 discusses TAM affixes. Chapter 6 concisely describes the grammatical and derivational uses of focus suffixes. Chapter 7 is an elaborate discussion and classification of the large set of verbal prefixes in Takivatan. The final chapter concludes with an overview of definiteness markers, personal pronouns, demonstratives and other pronominal forms.
Thirty-six papers presented at the conference were submitted for these proceedings, of which twenty-one were accepted for publication after an anonymous peer review. Papers were anonymously reviewed by at least two academic referees to DIISR standards and a majority of papers were reviewed by experts at overseas universities. The review process for the proceedings was separate from and in addition to that of the conference abstracts. We are grateful to all referees for their meticulous work and their constructive comments. We are especially indebted to Joanne Taylor for her invaluable expertise in all stages of the editing process.
The underlying assumption of this entire volume is that linguistic structure is not only shaped by how speakers interact with each other and with the world they live in, but also by external forces that are outside the control of individual speakers or speech communities. One might call it natural selection in grammar, were it not for the fact that it is not entirely clear whether biological and linguistic change operate along the same real-world principles, or whether any correspondences are much more superficial.