Strengthening the ties that exist: Reexploring charted territory

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

WHAT MADURESE CAN TELL US ABOUT OTHER LANGUAGES AND WHAT OTHER LANGUAGES CAN TELL US ABOUT MADURESE

There are many reasons to study a particular language. One might study a language to learn to speak that language in order to be able to communicate with native speakers or conduct business. One can study a language to learn about the culture of the people or understand their literature and poetry. One can study the grammar of a language to understand the structure of that language and compare it to the structure of other languages It is this last reason that motivates the following discussion

MADURESE CONTROL

This paper provides an overview of some characteristics of a Madurese grammatical construction in which the subject or object of the main verb supplies the reference for a nonovert participant in the complement, what is generally referred to under the rubric as 'control' in generative syntactic theory. The data indicate that control in Madurese shows some similarities to control in English and other languages, but that there are important differences as well

Methodological Thoughts from the Linguistic Field

Data are the heart and soul of any linguistic research. Regardless of how incisive an analysis might be, or how clever, it can never be any better than the data it is based upon. For the field linguist gathering data, important considerations include the selection of informants, the number of informants selection, and data collection techniques. Different research objectives, be they descriptive, prescriptive or theory-driven, require techniques appropriate to those particular goals and should be evaluated within the context of inquiry. What follows is a consideration of the techniques generally used by field linguists with a general descriptive goal within the framework of generative linguistics