Awara Phonology and the Awara Verbal System

Description

Publisher: University of North Dakota Publication date: 2002 Number of pages: 143Awara is a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea spoken in the Finisterre Mountain Range. Though it has been mentioned in papers written about the Finisterre-Huon languages and about the Wantoat language (another language in the Wantoat family), the Awara sound system has not been described in depth. This paper describes the Awara phonemic inventory, autosegmental features, morphophonemic processes, and implications for the Awara orthography. The analysis is presented within the framework of rules-based Generative Phonology. This paper presents a description of the verbal system of the Awara language. The major grammatical constructions described are 1) the verbal morphology, 2) serial-verb constructions, 3) clause chaining, and 4) subordination. Interesting aspects of the language shown here are 1) the variety of clause types based on the type of subject-indexing suffix, if any, used on the clause and 2) the variety of structures and functions of serial-verb constructions.