Information Structure in the Languages of Northern Sarawak
Dr Charlotte Hemmings explored information structure in the languages of Northern Sarawak as part of an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2016-425). The research combined documentation and description of three indigenous languages in Northern Sarawak with innovative theoretical work into information structure – an emerging field of linguistics that explores how languages distinguish between important and background information.
The first aim of the project was to explore the role of information structure in determining syntactic choices in three closely-related languages: Kelabit, Lun Bawang and Sa’ban. This was designed to enrich our understanding of Austronesian languages, and offer new perspectives on some of their typologically unusual characteristics, but also to contribute to the development of general models of information structure by incorporating analyses from lesser-studied languages.
The second aim of the project was to expand on the documentation and description of Kelabit, Lun Bawang and Sa’ban in order to help create lasting records for the future. Kelabit and Sa’ban are classified as ‘threatened’ by the Ethnologue, and spoken by fewer than 6,000 and 2,000 speakers respectively. Lun Bawang, and the related varieties of Lundayeh, are spoken by a larger population in Sarawak, Kalimantan, Sabah and Brunei (c. 47,500). However, the dialect spoken in Ba Kelalan, which was the focus of this project, differs in interesting ways from other better‑documented varieties, and has a population of 1,200. In each case, speakers are increasingly migrating to towns and cities where many younger speakers shift to languages of wider communication, such as Malay and English. Consequently, each of the languages documented in this project can be considered endangered to some degree. This means that work to document and help in community efforts to revitalise are increasingly important.
The project involved two periods of fieldwork in Sarawak, Malaysia from October-December 2017 and January-March 2019. I spent time in the towns of Kuching and Miri, as well as the three main field sites for the project: Bario (Kelabit); Ba Kelalan (Lun Bawang) and Long Banga (Sa’ban). I am extremely grateful for all the assistance I received from the Kelabit, Lun Bawang and Sa’ban communities; the Sarawak Museum; colleagues at UNIMAS and researchers with a specialisation in the languages and cultures of Sarawak.
During the project, I worked together with community members to collect recordings of the three languages in a variety of genres, including folk stories, descriptions of cultural practices, conversations, songs and oral histories. I also elicited example sentences and grammaticality judgements on the acceptability of different structures in different contexts. Finally, I asked multiple speakers of each language to participate in linguistic tasks. These included the ‘unhappy rats’ translation task (Riester & Latrouite 2018) in which speakers had to translate a series of short paragraphs from English and the ‘pear story’ video stimulus task (Chafe 1980) in which speakers had to retell the narrative of the pear story after watching a short video with no words. The recordings are transcribed and translated into English using the ELAN software and have formed the basis of my analysis.
The main outputs from this project include an archivable collection of naturalistic discourse in Lun Bawang, Kelabit and Sa’ban; conference presentations at international conferences; journal articles; and a manuscript on the role of information structure in determining syntactic choices in the languages of Northern Sarawak. A selection of the recordings and linguistic resources are available on this website together with papers, publications and work in progress. Language data was also deposited in the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS for long-term preservation.