Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a comprehensive reference grammar of Jambi Malay, a group of closely related Malay dialects spoken in the Jambi Province of southern Sumatra, Indonesia. The dissertation concentrates on the Jambi Malay spoken in the area around Jambi City, and covers three dialects, namely the Tanjung Raden dialect, the Mudung Darat dialect, and the City dialect, with a focus on the Tanjung Raden dialect. These dialects share similarities in many aspects of the grammar, but they also show differences in other aspects of the grammar.

The data for this grammar are based on naturalistic recordings collected over several years and on elicited data that complements the naturalistic data. The naturalistic data are comprised of texts consisting of traditional folk stories, personal narratives and conversations representing everyday interactions between speakers.

This dissertation follows the Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire (Comrie and Smith, 1977) and covers three main linguistic areas: the syntax, the morphology, and the phonology. These are presented in Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3, respectively. In addition to providing the facts about Jambi Malay in as theoretically neutral a fashion as possible, the dissertation also proposes analyses for a number of topics with respect to significant issues in linguistic theory as applied to Austronesian languages. These topics include the voice system, clause structure, wh- questions, and relative clauses (among others).