SORIENTE, Antonia, 2013. ‘Variation in aspect and modality in some languages of Northeastern Borneo’. In John BOWDEN (ed.), Tense, aspect, mood and evidentiality in languages of Indonesia. NUSA 55:193-218. [Permanent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10108/74333] Variation in aspect and modality in some languages of Northeastern Borneo Antonia Soriente University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology In most of the languages of Northeastern Borneo the categories of aspect and modality are almost always expressed lexically and often are optional. This paper discusses the expression of perfective and imperfective aspect as well as mood and negation as conveyed through a wide range of mostly unbound morphemes in four North Sarawak languages. The languages consist of two Kenyah variants, Lebu’ Kulit, and Òma Lóngh as well as two langauges spoken by former hunter-gatherers, the Punan Tubu’and the Penan Benalui. The data used draws from bot narratives and elicited material. The lexemes used are in large part discourse context and verb semantics dependent, and differ in all the languages. The lexical meaning of the form used for the pefective is usually ‘finished’ and for the imperfective it is ‘in the middle’. The exception is in Punan Tubu’ and Penau Benalui where the infix <en> marks the undergoer voice and also bears the meaning of perfectivity. Quotative verbs are generally used to express evidentiality and no bound evidentials are found. 1. Aspect in Borneo and beyond The rich diversity of languages spoken in Borneo is reflected in the different aspect and modality markers that occur in the various languages. Precise information regarding the TAME markers in most of the languages of Central Borneo is lacking, perhaps due in part to the fact that in general these markers are optional. Aspect and modality are almost always expressed lexically and often seem to be non-obligatory, and in large part, discourse context and verb semantics contribute to the expression of TAME features. After all, as Himmelmann (2005: 60) points out, in many Western Austronesian languages the ‘auxiliaries’ are elements that usually convey notions of tense, aspect, mood, negation, or manner and are phonologically independent. The free and clitic aspectual adverbs used for TAM marking in most of the Western Austronesian languages of Indonesia is also displayed in the World atlas of linguistic structures -WALS (Dryer 2011). Kaufmann (2011) provides an overview of TAM marking in Indonesia, and concludes that while ‘inner aspect’ marked by reduplication and <in> infixation, and ‘outer aspect’ can be reconstructed as PAN *dala and PAN *pa, most of the modern Indonesian TAM markers are un-reconstructable because those that exist are very diverse, while sometimes they are lacking completely. Those that do exist are therefore recent innovations. As Kaufman (2011) points out, in Old Malay, ‘all the inherited aspect markers were abandoned and replaced (functionally) by lexical items meaning ‘want’, desire’, towards, ‘finish’ etc. A general overview of some languages of Borneo confirms this to be the case in Borneo, too, as can be seen in Clayre & Cubit (1963) for Kayan, Clayre (2002) for Lundaye, Tjia (2007) for Mualang, Adelaar (2002) for Salako, Sercombe (2006) for Eastern Penan, and Inagaki (2011) for Kadorih, among others. This paper describes a wide range of strategies used in a variety of languages from Northeastern Borneo to express TAM and evidentiality. It especially focuses on two Kenyah variants spoken in East Kalimantan: Lebu’ Kulit, and Òma Lóngh and compares the strategies found in these languages to those employed in the neighboring languages of Penan Benalui and Punan Tubu’. This comparison draws on narrative texts (see Soriente, 2006 and Soriente et al, To appear) and elicited material. The Kenyah represented in this study are from the Òma Lóngh group, which constitutes a population of 3000 spread