A Preliminary Investigation of Yilan Creole in Taiwan: Discussing predicate position in Yilan Creole

• Author / Creator

  Qiu,Peng

• Yilan Creole is a Japanese-based creole with features from an Austronesian language, Atayal, spoken in Yilan County, Taiwan. It was recognized by Chien and Sanada in 2006 (Chien & Sanada, 2010a), but much is still unknown about the language. Yilan Creole possesses many linguistic features of the Japanese language, yet it is still incomprehensible to either Japanese or Atayal native speakers.
  My thesis is based on elicitations and recordings of actual speech from the fieldwork that I did in Yilan County during the months of July of 2013, January and February of 2014. It consists of three chapters. Chapter one focuses on the social and historical perspectives of Yilan Creole. Chapter two presents a grammatical sketch of Yilan Creole, focusing on sound system, lexicon, morphology and syntax. Chapter three analyzes the various predicate positions found in Yilan Creole, a mostly predicate final order language similar to that of Japanese (Sanada & Chien, 2008a, p.72). Interestingly, the Yilan Creole also features other types of predicates in medial positions found in the examples of the clauses that contain the verbs mietala ‘look like’ and aru ‘have’. The examples of the sentences that contain object clauses as the main clause verbs are in the medial position but the object clause predicates are still in the final position.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Atayal
  • Creoles
  • Taiwan
  • Japanese
  • Predicate position

• Graduation date

  Spring 2015

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3930P347

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.