Perfective aspect and negation in Pontianak Teochew
Date
2015
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This research investigates Pontianak Teochew, a Chinese dialect that
originated in the Chaoshan region of Guandong province in China. Pontianak is the
capital city of West Kalimantan in Indonesia. The primary goal is to discuss perfective
aspect and negation, and discuss the sociolinguistic backgrounds of the speakers of the
language, which were obtained by interviews and questionnaires.
From the interviews, I draw the following conclusion: the choice of languages
among the Teochew people in Pontianak has been influenced by four main factors.
The first one is the language spoken by people at home, i.e. parents, grandparents, and
care-takers. The second is the national policy. The third one is education, and the
fourth is the language used by neighbors, friends, and co-workers. Each of these
factors greatly affects the vitality of Pontianak Teochew.
The results of the questionnaires show that there has not been a significant
reduction in the number of domains where Teochew is spoken from the older
generation to the younger generation. Both the younger and the older groups have the
same patterns of language use in thirty-two domains. In terms of language attitudes,
both the young and older generations have positive attitudes about their mother
tongue, formal Indonesian, English and other foreign languages.
Based on the extended scale proposed by Lewis and Simons (2010), Teochew
in Pontianak can be described as level 6b. For UNESCO category, Teochew is
“vulnerable” or level 4. Based on the speaker population, Teochew is “unsafe” or level
4. In terms of the amount and quality of documentation, it can be classified as level 0:
“undocumented.” In terms of the material for language education and literacy, it can
be classified as level 0: “no orthography available to the community” because the
language is spoken at home and being transmitted with no written forms.
The analysis on the perfective markers show that diau, dio[glottal stop] and lou can be
differentiated from the syntactic and semantic properties. The use of the perfective
marker lou is generally selected by the features of [expected, positive] of the event.
The predicates/events that take diau have the following general features [unexpected,
negative, intransitive unaccusative], and the predicates/events that take dioɁ have the
following features [unexpected, positive/ negative, transitive].
The analysis on the interactions show that: 1) None of the ‘b’ negative
markers, i.e. bo, boi, bue, can co-occur with the perfective marker lou, 2) All of the
‘m’ negative markers can co-occur with all of the perfective markers, except for m and
dio[glottal stop], and 3) None of the perfective markers can co-occur with bo, except for dio[glottal stop]. In
terms of the scope, the assumption is that lou is the perfective marker that takes the
widest scope over all the negative markers. The negative markers bo, boi, and bue,
which expresses the idea of not having something, or some event not happening is
incompatible with the notion of perfectivity expressed by lou. In contrast, the cooccurrence
of the m negative markers with lou, with lou taking the scope, results in the
reading as ‘already in the state of not being or doing such and such.’ The
incompatibility between dio[glottal stop] and m is caused by the difference in the types of the
predicates. The marker dio[glottal stop] and bo is compatible because only the affirmative
sentences with dio[glottal stop] can be emphasized using u ’exist.’