Marking System in the Dialect of Lamalera, a Member of Lamaholot Language Family

Abstract

Marking is a universal linguistic phenomenon. Marking is the giving of a marker either free or bound, either in front or back on a morphological form. Marking in each language is very unique and diverse. The syntactic theory states that grammatical relation, case marking, and agreement are always directly or indirectly related. The Dialect of Lamalera (DL) is one of 35 dialects in the Lamaholot Language family. The Lamalera dialect has a pronominal marker attached either to the front in a number of certain categories of words or back in other categories. Interestingly, the DL is almost entirely in all categories of words. The provision of markers on a number of categories triggers conformity to the word category often referred to as agreement verbs, personal clitics, subject markers, personal (prefixes, suffixes), agreement markers, or subject-verb agreements. This paper examines the alignment in the DL without comparing it with dialects or other languages. Data analysis states that the marking in the DL is distinguished by shifting based on the clitic position of proclitic and enclitic and marking based on the category of words in DL such as sharpening of the pre-categorical (intransitive/transitive) verb categories, free (intransitive/transitive) verbs, possessive, reflexive, demonstrative and numeral), conjunctions and adjectives. The enclitic marker in the possessive category is to claim ownership or possessiveness, the meaning of the enclitic marker in the reflexive category is to say 'self', and the meaning of enclosure in the adjective category is to refer to the subject clause and express the pronominal intensity or emphasize the noun that it followed.