The goal of the project is the creation of a descriptive grammar of the syntax of Madurese, a Western Austronesian language of Indonesia. The grammar will fill a void in the relatively small literature on Madurese, the fourth most widely spoken language in the world's fifth most populous nation, and will serve as a reference for linguists and anthropologists with various interests. Although the work will be grounded in the general assumptions of generative linguistics and will be informed by recent developments in theoretical linguistics and recent studies in Austronesian linguistics, the grammar will be a largely descriptive work. The three year project, to be conducted at the University of Iowa and in Western Madura in Indonesia, will consist of (1) the collection of data through consultation with Madurese speakers, via direct elicitation and tape recorded texts and conversations, (2) analysis and collation of data, and (3) creation of a grammar in both hypertext and print monograph media. The project will focus on the following types of syntactic considerations: 0 the syntax of subclausal constituents such as the noun phrase, the verb phrase, the prepositional phrase; 0 the means of expressing anaphoric relations and possession; 0 sentence types, such as existentials, locationals, copulars, verbal sentences, questions; 0 clausal modification, including negation, modality, and adverbial modification; 0 syntax beyond the clause, including complementation, coordination, relative clause formation, adverbial clauses. Particular attention wig be given to the areas of voice marking, question formation, anaphora, and word order, as these grammatical phenomena interact in important and interesting ways in Madurese. These phenomena will also inform discussion and debate in current theoretical linguistics (particularly question formation and anaphora, which have been a primary focus of generative linguistics for decades) and in comparative Austronesian studies, where much current work has focused on voice marking, question formation, and anaphora. The resulting grammar will thus not only serve to make accessible detailed information of the syntax of Madurese but will also inform theory construction in linguistics.
