Documentation of Northern Alta: grammar, texts and glossary

Abstract

The first chapter of the dissertation provides a description of the sociolinguistic background of Northern Alta and subsequently presents the methods used to collect data in the field, including recording methods, elicitation techniques, and type and level of annotations added to each recording. The structure and outputs of the documentary collection, including the metadata structure and organization of the data using the ELAN software, are then described. Finally, the way in which the data is presented in this dissertation is discussed at the end of the first chapter.

Chapter 2 deals with the phonology of the language and discusses the orthography used in the corpus of annotated recordings. Chapter 3 examines morphology, with a focus on the morpho-phonological alternations occurring frequently in the language, which include assimilation, gemination, consonant deletion, epenthesis, nasal substitution, aphaeresis, stress change, syncope, vowel lengthening and vowel lowering. The chapter ends with a preliminary analysis of reduplication patterns.

Chapter 4 discusses the types of phrases attested in Northern Alta, describing their possible constituent structure and syntactic functions. The second part of the chapter provides an overview of the possible clause types, which are defined in terms of the type of predicates they have. Three main clause types are defined: clauses with voice-marked predicate, clauses with voice-unmarked predicate and clauses with an Existential as predicate.

Chapter 5 presents a classification of the parts of speech. The first part of the chapter deals with proforms, which include Personal Pronouns, Demonstratives and Interrogative Pronouns. The second part of the chapter introduces the different classes of function words. The third part of the chapter discusses the problems related to the classification of Northern Alta content words, and defines two major classes on the basis of morphological criteria, V-words and U-words. Other classes of content words include Adverbs, Existentials and another group of content words that we refer to as content words derived by affixes.

Chapter 6 presents an analysis of case relations, conducted on the basis of the syntactic functions and semantic roles of the different case-marked constituents, such as Determiner Phrases, Pronouns and Demonstratives. The results of the analysis distinguish four different cases: Absolutive, Genitive, Oblique and Locative.

Chapter 7 deals with the classification of V-words, distributed in four main classes, nonderived words, Potentive words, Stative words and Causative. Since V-words are defined in terms of their voice and aspectual morphology, we discuss voice affixation and aspectual inflection for each subclass, and illustrate them with glossed examples.

Chapter 8 provides interlinear morpheme glossing for a twenty-five minute monologue that was recorded with native speaker Ginalyn Garcia. The monologue was recorded in a place called Minero, an area where the Alta used to dwell in the past but decided to abandon when they settled in the barangays. The contains a high number of Demonstratives, including phrases where the Demonstrative appears in the article slot of a DP. The video provides an additional value to the text given that many of these Demonstratives are accompanied by gestures. The text is also valuable from a historical perspective as it offers a number of stories from the time the Alta were living there.

Finally, Chapter 9 provides a glossary of the language which was compiled by extracting the lexical data of the database that was created using the SIL software Fieldworks Language Explorer. The chapters begins with an introduction to the glossary, in which the sources of words, the content of an entry, as well as other related problems are discussed. The second part of the chapter contains the Northern Alta-English glossary and the third part of the chapter provides an English-Northern Alta reversal index.

Northern Alta (códico iso: aqn) es una lengua „Negrito‟ hablada por menos de 300 personas en la zona oeste de la isla de Luzón, en las Filipinas. Sus hablantes son negritos, un grupo étnico perteneciente a las poblaciones austroloides-melanesias consideradas como las primeras en habitar las islas, habiendo llegado al territorio hace al menos 50.000 años. Como muchas otras lenguas del archipiélago Filipino, la lengua no se está transmitiendo a la generación de niños y por tanto necesita ser documentada y descrita con urgencia. El presente estudio trata de responder a esta necesitad.

Esta tesis doctoral es uno de los resultados del proyecto de documentación de la lengua Northern Alta, en el cual hemos producido un total de 19 horas de grabaciones de video y audio, de la cuales hemos transcrito y traducido 13 horas. El corpus de grabaciones transcritas ha proporcionado los datos que aparecen en este trabajo, que consiste en una descripción de la gramática de la lengua, un texto de 25 minutos glosado (grabación 103) y un glosario de 2400 entradas (alta – inglés, inglés, alta).