The The Syntax of Personal Pronouns in the Bima Language

Abstract

This article aims at describing the syntactic properties and distributions of Personal Pronouns in the Bima Language, a language spoken by approximately 9000 people who inhabit the eastern part of Sumbawa Island. This number of speakers does not include those who live in Reo Pota Manggarai, East Nusa Tenggara. The Bima Language is grouped into Sumba-Bima Subgroup of Central Malayo-Polynesian (CMP) branch of Austronesian Language. Data in this study are the linguistic units from morphems level to clausal level. The data were taken from conversations and monologues recorded in the real situations in which the Bima Language is used. The focus of this paper is to describe the personal pronoun system of the Bima Language, describing types of personal pronouns and their syntactic properties and distributions. Based on the analysis, the Bima Language has a set of morphologically independent personal pronouns (full pronouns) and a set of clitics. Both sets of personal pronouns show the same syntactic properties and distributions. These two sets of personal pronouns are able to occur as independent clausal arguments of both intransitive and transitive constructions. In addition to their distributions, these two sets of personal pronouns can occur with numerals, relatives, and NPs. However, only full personal pronouns can combine with demonstratives.