Hurlbut Hope M. Verb morphology in eastern Kadazan

The Australian National University, Research School of Pacific Studies, 1988. — 152 p. — (Pacific Linguistics: Series B 97).Kadazan (or Dusun as some dialects are called) is spoken in many areas of Sabah, East Malaysia, and many of the dialects are mutually unintelligible. It is a language of the Bornean stock. The total number of Kadazan/Dusun speakers is over 100,000. The particular dialect that this study is about is known as Eastern Kadazan, the speakers of which number some 6,000 to 7,000 (census figures, 1970). The majority of speakers live on or near the Labuk River which is one of the major rivers of Sabah, originating high up on the slopes of Mt Kinabalu in central Sabah and flowing eastward for over a hundred miles to reach the sea just north of the town of Sandakan. The dialect varies along the length of the river, but is mutually intelligible from the mouth of the river to beyond Wonod, a village 96 miles inland by road from Sandakan. There are two smaller groups of speakers called Mangkaak and Sukang found on some of the northern tributaries of the Kinabatangan River which lies south of the Labuk River.
Probably the biggest problem area in analysing the verbal system in Eastern Kadazan (hereafter called Kadazan) is the very complex affix system. There are two or three times as many affixes in Kadazan as, for example, in Tagalog (about which many helpful books have already been written, for example De Guzman 1979). The combinations of affixes in Kadazan consequently number in the hundreds, and it is a daunting task to try to bring order out of what seems to be a chaotic system of inflectional and derivational affixes. Other problems are the semantics of the verbs themselves and the changes that they manifest with different types of affIxation.