From Phonology to Syntax: Insights from Jangkat Malay

Abstract

Jangkat is a Malayic variety spoken in the Bukit Barisan Mountains, in the Malay homeland of Sumatra. It provides insight into the role of the phonology-syntax interface in the development of morphosyntactic agreement in Malay. To provide context, roots in nearly all Malayic languages exhibit a single form in all morpho-syntactic environments. However, in certain regions of Sumatra, especially in Kerinci, there exist ‘root-alternating varieties’, varieties wherein roots exhibit two (or more) forms with distinct morphosyntactic distributions. Kerinci exhibits agreement-like morphological object registration: most words in the language exhibit a special form marking the presence of a nominal syntactic complement. The phonological realization of object registration is highly complex due to layer-upon-layer of historical changes in Kerinci phonology. These changes have obscured the grammatical development of Kerinci historically, leaving linguists to puzzle over how a Malayic language could develop such an extensive system of morphosyntactic marking. Jangkat exhibits morphophonological root-shape alternations reminiscent of those described in Kerinci, but, unlike Kerinci, the phonology of the Jangkat alternation is relatively straightforward. We argue that Jangkat not only reveals the origins of Kerinci’s morphosyntactic marking in phrase-level phonology, but it also illustrates the important role that the syntax-phonology interface plays in syntactic change.