Bunun

‘KNOT+ED’ was an event facilitated by the Sir James Fletcher Museum to bring together and share the traditional knowledge and practices of indigenous Taiwanese and Māori weavers. The purpose of the event was to encourage the sustainability of cultural knowledge by creating a platform for engagement with current and future generations. This booklet is a compilation of the key techniques and material uses of Tayal, Bunun and Māori traditional weaving skills, including the spiritual and symbolic meanings embodied and embedded within the weaving practices discussed.

This paper focuses on lexical nominalization, clausal nominalization and complementation, and relativization in Isbukun Bunun (Formosan, Austronesian). Based on fieldwork in Taoyuan, Kaohsiung in Taiwan, it shows the similarities and dissimilarities between the three different linguistic phenomena. It is found that the Philippine focus system plays a very important role in all three phenomena and that some markers are shared between them.

This paper will give a concise introduction into the Bunun language, an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Taiwan. Special attention will be given to the Takivatan dialect , which was the main focus of my research during the past five years [ De Busser (2009b， De Busser (2009a ) , De Busser (2010) ] . The introduction first discusses the Austronesian languages of Taiwan. Section 2 contains a short cultural profile of the Bunun people, locates the Bunun language in space, and gives an overview of dialectal variation within the language. Section 3 will focus on Takivatan, one of the five Bunun dialects. It contains a profile of Takivatan phonology and morphosyntax, and will take a closer look at the endangerment status of the dialect.

This paper discusses two major ways in which Christianity exerted an important influence on the Bunun language. In the second half of the twentieth century, Western Churches were instrumental in the protection of indigenous languages, including Bunun, against the aggressive and destructive policies of cultural and linguistic unification of the Taiwanese government. In a completely different way, the introduction of a Bible translation and various liturgical materials in Bunun led, especially in the Presbyterian Church, to the creation of an artificial variant of the language that is a consensus between the dominant Isbukun dialect and other dialects, and over time has come to resemble a sort of supra-dialectal standard. This in turn resulted in the creation of a pan-dialectal religious vocabulary and an increased influence of Isbukun, the largest of Bunun dialects, on other dialects. Today, a complex relationship exists between this influential religious standard and more localised dialects of Bunun.

This paper discusses two major ways in which Christianity exerted an important influence on the Bunun language. In the second half of the twentieth century, Western Churches were instrumental in the protection of indigenous languages, including Bunun, against the aggressive and destructive policies of cultural and linguistic unification of the Taiwanese government. In a completely different way, the introduction of a Bible translation and various liturgical materials in Bunun led, especially in the Presbyterian Church, to the creation of an artificial variant of the language that is a consensus between the dominant Isbukun dialect and other dialects, and over time has come to resemble a sort of supra-dialectal standard. This in turn resulted in the creation of a pan-dialectal religious vocabulary and an increased influence of Isbukun, the largest of Bunun dialects, on other dialects. Today, a complex relationship exists between this influential religious standard and more localised ...

This paper gives an overview of the lexical, morphological and syntactic strategies for expressing joint participation (associativity) and companionship (comitativity) and in the Takivatan dialect of Bunun. The most common way for expressing different forms of joint participation in an event are auxiliary verb constructions such as uskun ‘together’ and hasul ‘taken together’, and associative verbal prefixes such as ka-, which is used to mark dynamic group events. In addition, noun phrase apposition and inclusory-type constructions convey meanings that can get both an associative and a comitative interpretation. Thirdly, Takivatan has a dedicated adverbial construction with the preposition sin, for expressing accompaniment. I will discuss the semantic and functional differences and correspondences between these strategies and investigate to what extent they are related to more general strategies for clausal and phrasal coordination in Takivatan Bunun.

[Off-print available on request]
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.

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.

A. Time as a spatial metaphor As one of the pioneers in cognitive linguistics in the 20 th century, Whorf (1956: 153) says,�The formal equality of the spacelike units by which we measure and conceive time leads us to consider the �formless item� or �substance� of time to be homogeneous and in ratio to the number of units.� In this statement, Whorf refers to spatial metaphors of time in SAE (Standard Average European). Clark (1973: 48) remarks that �For a long time, linguists have noted that the spatial and temporal terms in English ...

This paper gives an overview of the lexical, morphological and syntactic strategies for expressing joint participation (associativity) and companionship (comitativity) and in the Takivatan dialect of Bunun. The most common way for expressing different forms of joint participation in an event are auxiliary verb constructions such as uskun ‘together’ and hasul ‘taken together’, and associative verbal prefixes such as ka-, which is used to mark dynamic group events. In addition, noun phrase apposition and inclusory-type constructions convey meanings that can get both an associative and a comitative interpretation. Thirdly, Takivatan has a dedicated adverbial construction with the preposition sin, for expressing accompaniment. I will discuss the semantic and functional differences and correspondences between these strategies and investigate to what extent they are related to more general strategies for clausal and phrasal coordination in Takivatan Bunun.

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 paper 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.