Nasal Vowels in Solor Dialect of Lamaholot Language and Their Morpho-Syntactic Significance

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The Lamaholot language spoken in East Flores and Lembata has several interesting distinctive features, compared to its neighboring languages. One of these features is nasal vowels. Nasal vowels in this language are phonemic, in that they show distinct meanings in contrasted minimal-pair words. Because of this phonemic characteristic, the nasal vowels in the dialect have significant influences on the Lamaholot linguistics. This research will examine the importance of nasal vowels in Solor dialect of Lamaholot morphologically and syntactically. Two research problems this study has tried to answer are (1) what are the morphologic and syntactic significances of the nasal vowels of Solor Dialect of Lamaholot Language, and (2) what meanings do these nasal vowels indicate when they involve in morphological processes? Apart from being an additional linguistic reference for the study of languages in eastern Indonesia in particular, and Austronesian languages at a broader level, this research also contributes to the efforts to maintain regional languages in East Nusa Tenggara. The approach to be used in this study is descriptive. The theory referred to is functional typology with the concepts of Basic Linguistic Theory based on generative structural grammar. References to the theory can be read, among others, in Payne (1997), Dixon (2010a), Comrie (1989) and Sophen (2007a, 2007b, 2007c). Data for this study was collected through recording and elicitation from the native speakers of Solor dialect. The collected corpus in the form of audio data is analyzed and stored electronically with the Praat application, and then transcribed into text form. The text data is sorted, then analyzed and stored electronically with the Toolbox application, which can later be used as additional data for the Solor – Lamaholot dialect dictionary database, which the author is currently working on. The research results show that the presence of nasal vowels in the Solor dialect of the Lamaholot language gives very significant and influential contribution to the communication and speech of speakers of this dialect. This grammatical feature is so important that its presence can give rise to different interpretations by listeners. Morphosyntactically, the nasal vowels in Solor dialect of the Lamaholot language express five functions, namely (1) to express the pronominal form of ownership; (2) to express the form of alienable ownership; (3) to express the enclitic form of third person singular possession in common nouns; (4) to state the participial function derived from the verb; and (5) to express the attributive function of adjectives in the Solor dialect of the Lamaholot language.