Semelai is an Aslian language belonging to the Mon-Khmer division of Austroasiatic. It is spoken by approximately 4,103 people in Peninsular Malaysia around the shores of Tasek Bera, along the banks of the Bera, Teriang and Serting rivers in south-west Pahang and north-west Negeri Sembilan states, and the Muar River in north-west Johore (see Maps).

As with all Aslian languages, there is no written tradition, or recorded history, other than oral based.

1.1 Linguistic type

Semelai exhibits many of the typological characteristics of a mainland Southeast Asian language, as well as incorporating aspects of Austronesian, notably from sustained contact with Malay. Whilst there has been considerable impact from Malay, particularly at the lexical level, Semelai remains a distinctly mainland Austroasiatic language, but at the same time raises questions with respect to our understanding of the typology of this region.

A. Phonology Semelai has a rich phonemic inventory. There are thirty-two consonant phonemes, including a series of voiceless nasals which have not been recorded previously in an Aslian language; a series of glottalised sonorants, and twenty vowel phonemes: ten oral vowels and ten phonemically nasal counterparts (§2.1).

The maximal canonical syllable is [CV(C)]σ. Phonemic contrasts of both consonants and vowels are richest in the final syllable; for consonants these contrasts are maximised in the onset of the final syllable.

In this chapter, syntax at the level above the simple clause is examined, in other words, sentences comprising combinations of simple clauses. Relative clauses, where a clause modifies a noun, are discussed in §11.1. This is followed by a discussion of complementation, where a complement clause fills a core argument position, A, S or O, in a higher clause (§11.2). The discussion then turns to the three constructions where a clause functions to modify a VP or a proposition: serial verb constructions (§11.3), the concatenation of independent clauses (§11.4), and connective clauses (§11.5).

An areal feature of South-east Asian languages is the general absence of formal signalling to code the conjoining or embedding of clauses in complex constructions, resulting in a low level of structural difference. For the most part, in Semelai the various complex sentences simply consist of the unmarked paratactic and, to a lesser extent, the hypotactic concatenation of two or more clauses. Note that although the distinction can be difficult to establish in certain cases, there is in principle a distinction between the simple concatenation of independent clauses (§11.4) and serialised verb constructions (§11.3).

A note is in order on the analytic means of distinguishing the covertly combined clauses. Decisions were made in accordance with the intuitions of the Semelai speakers, phrase and clause level pauses, and intonation contours.

In Chapter 9 the discussion centres around grammatical relations, constituent order and coding strategies. In addition to the three grammatical relations A, S, O, a fourth member, indirect object (IO), is identified. The IO exhibits dual membership – it is coded as an oblique in a prepositional phrase, but exhibits the syntactic behaviour associated with a core role (§9.1.4).

The most frequently employed constituent order is verb initial, with either A and O, or S placed after the verb. Various pragmatically determined permutations are possible, and these are outlined in §9.2.

The coding of grammatical relations is dependent on the transitivity of the clause, and it is in accordance with this distinction that they are discussed in §9.3.

The minimal clause in Semelai consists of just the predicate. The means of representation of NPs in the clause and zero anaphora are discussed in §9.4.

9.1 Grammatical relations

Grammatical relations can be divided into core and oblique (Andrews 1985). In Semelai, the distinction is validated by their differing morphological and syntactic behaviour. Core grammatical relations are central to syntactic processes such as causativisation and relativisation, and have distinctive patterns of NP-marking and verbal cross-referencing. A clear distinction between the core and non-core constituents can be established by examining relativisation, interrogative formation, fronting and the distribution of possessor =hn ‘3poss’ (§9.1.3).

Semelai has thirty-two consonant phonemes and twenty vowel phonemes. Consonants are discussed in §2.1.1 and vowels in §2.1.2. §2.2 provides a description of the syllable and the processes of syllabification. The structure of the syllable is central to the organisation of the phonology, and in turn an understanding of this structure provides the groundwork for the description of the structure of morphological processes in §3. The main discussion of segmental structure is contained in §2.3. The segmental and distributional possibilities of Semelai consonants illustrate that language-specific sequence structure constraints are not only necessary, but in fact reflect other morphological outcomes and the nature of the language's phonotactic system. §2.4 provides some comments on Malay loanwords and patterns of borrowing into Semelai. The chapter concludes with remarks on the comparative phonology of Aslian languages in §2.5.

2.1 Inventory of phonemes

2.1.1 Consonants

The five places of articulation are labial, alveolar, palatal, velar and glottal. Oral stops are produced at all five places of articulation. The three manners of articulation of oral stops are voiced, voiceless and voiceless aspirated. There is a corresponding series of nasal stops at each place of articulation of the oral stops.

Two places of articulation are distinguished for fricative segments (palatal and glottal); two for glides (labio-velar and palatal); and one for the rhotic and the lateral (both alveolar).

This is a description of Semelai, an Aslian language spoken by some 4,000 people in Peninsular Malaysia. The present book is a revision of my doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Melbourne in 1999. The study is based on a corpus of data collected during an initial period of fieldwork undertaken from July 1990 to June 1991 at Tasek Bera, in the state of Pahang. Insights from recent visits in 2000-1, whilst a postdoctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have also been included. Revisions have been completed during a post-doctoral fellowship at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

First and foremost, this book represents an initial step in the documentation of a unique and complex language, in an area which to date has been largely neglected by linguists.

My main consideration in writing this grammar was to provide a lucid and accessible account of Semelai for linguists of all theoretical persuasions. The language is described in terms of Basic Linguistic Theory. I have sought to treat equally all aspects of the grammar, examining form and meaning and providing semantic motivations for the various distinctions made within it. A generous number of examples and texts are included to illustrate the discussion and to create a reference work, which will be of use to descriptivists and typologists alike.

In Chapter 5 the categories that are marked morphologically on the verb are examined. Prior to discussing the functions of the morphemes, the structure of the verbal word is examined in §5.1. We then pass to a semantic classification of verbs in §5.2.

In Chapter 3 the structural processes of morphology were examined. The focus in this chapter is on the function of the derivational morphemes (§5.3 and §5.4), and verbal clitics (§5.5).

In §5.6 we diverge from categories marked morphologically on the verb, to a description of modal auxiliaries, treated systematically here on the basis of semantic category.

5.1 The structure of the verbal word

The structure of the verbal word is determined by whether the argument structure of the verb is intransitive or transitive (§5.2). Intransitive verbs are generally more simple in structural terms than transitive verbs, as there are fewer categorial distinctions available. In its simplest form the verbal word exists in the root form; at its most complex it may be host to a number of affixes and/or clitics.

Derivational affixes predominantly take the form of prefixes and infixes, but also include a suffix and a circumfix. These are immediately adjacent, located either on the left or right edge, or in the case of infixes, internal to the root. Peripheral to derivational morphemes are the proclitics.

In this chapter, the morphemic composition of words is examined, and an overview of the morphology is given in terms of the processes of word formation. The discussion of the various morphological processes will be organised according to the formal structures of process. A brief description of the function will be given, but the main discussion will be found in subsequent chapters.

The chapter begins with a description of theoretical preliminaries in §3.1 and an overview of the forms and processes. Affixation is organised into two sections according to the sub-systems which operate at this level: the indigenous system will be discussed in §3.2.2, and the loan system in §3.2.3. In §3.2.4 cases of archaic non-concatenative affixation are examined. Cliticisation is discussed in §3.3.

In the following discussion of morphology no particular theoretical model is adopted, although my treatment of the non-concatenative nature of the morphology processes draws broadly on the theories of prosodic morphology and template morphology. Descriptive tools have been adapted from consideration of the works of McCarthy (1981), Marantz (1982), Broselow and McCarthy (1983), Ter Mors (1983), and McCarthy and Prince (1990) to account for the features of Semelai morphology.

The term non-concatenative is adopted here pace McCarthy (1981) in its extended application used to account for reduplication processes (see also Spencer 1991, Gafos 1994).