2020 LLL Conference Featured Talk: "A Grammar of Western Subanon"
Channel: Graduate Student Conference of the College of LLL
Date: 2020-05-26

This featured talk was presented by Sharon Joy Bulalang during the 24th annual College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature Graduate Student Conference on April 18, 2020. Ms. Bulalang was a 2020 LLL Excellence in Research award winner (PhD student) and was invited to give this talk.

Abstract: This dissertation is a grammatical description of Subanon (also known as Western Subanon or Siocon Subanon, ISO 639-3 sub), a highly endangered Austronesian language with about 125,000 speakers living on Zamboanga Peninsula in the Philippines. This dissertation is the first ever comprehensive description of the language and the first to be accompanied by a documentary corpus. Topics addressed include: sound system, word classes, morpho-syntactic properties of verbal clauses, clause combination, serial verb construction, interrogative and imperative structures, ellipsis, scope, verbless clauses, discourse markers, numerals reduplications, metaphors, idioms, euphemisms, onomatopoeias, and anger words. Research for this dissertation is based on first-hand field work conducted in the region of Malayal, supplemented by my own native speaker knowledge of the language. All data collected for this research—including recordings, transcriptions and annotation files—are accessible via the Kaipuleohone Digital Ethnographic Archive at the University of Hawai’i. In addition to its contribution to the scientific understanding of human language, the dissertation and accompanying corpus of recordings provide a means of preserving the language for the next generation of speakers and facilitate the development of curriculum and instructional materials to teach the language in the Subanon communities in Zamboanga. It is my hope that this grammar will not only be useful for linguists and the Subanon people, but also for other people who have an interest in saving endangered languages in the world.