Wu: Amis Pa-Verbs
This corpus contains 29 Coastal Amis sentence variants from Joy Wu's 2006 paper, The Analysis of Pa-Verbs in Amis. The paper identifies Haian/Coastal Amis from Changpin, Taitung. The XML has 154 W and 265 M, 33 sentence translations, and no audio.
All 13 source pages were reviewed. The corpus covers the sentence examples on pages 6–10; lexical tables and theory discussion are outside this sentence-example scope. The recorded exclusions cover repeated earlier examples, ungrammatical and questionable examples, forbidden alternatives and one starred translation. Person/car readings in 20c and both case forms of 36a remain separate, fully aligned variants. TEXT/@source carries the paper's URL and the SHA-256 of the transcribed PDF.
Notes and Issues
The source segments Pa-fli but gives only the whole-word gloss give; its two morphemes therefore have no individual glosses. Source form/gloss mismatches and analytic nulls are preserved. Original and standard PHON use different vowel and lateral inventories, so the tiers do not imply strict phonemic equivalence — in particular the standard tier merges Wu's u/o distinction, because Ortho113 Coastal writes one o for /o~u/. The source paper supplies no audio.
Wu prints example 36a in two case forms. They are two sentences, s36a and s36a-opt, because the alternation is a competing lexeme with a different gloss (t-u/DAT-NCM against i/PREP) rather than a spelling variant.
The corpus carries its own build test suite under CodeAndDocs/tests/, which pins the reviewed source decisions — exact sentence and morpheme IDs, counts, the unglossed Pa-fli boundary and the retained exclusions — so neither a shared-tool change nor a transcription edit can move them silently. It runs as the source-tests check of CodeAndDocs/validate.sh, and is not part of the repository-wide test run.
Corpus Statistics
Amis Coastal
Word count
154
Total audio
0
Transcribed
0
Untranscribed
0
Translated words
English
154
Mandarin
0
Japanese
0
Dutch
0
Morphologically segmented
154
Glossed words
154
Access Details
XML and reproducible build inputs are in the Amis-Pa-Verbs directory. Language is Amis (ami), dialect Coastal.
Corpus Processing
The committed transcription tables preserve source spelling, W glosses, translations, exclusions and stable source IDs. The current source review restores obligatory i/PREP in example 32c (*(i)), 22 printed sentence endings and the two printed parts of Pa-fli. The latter retains W gloss give; its M parts have no individually supplied gloss and remain unglossed. No sentence or free translation is removed. Source payau, ni/GEN-NCM, ku/NOM-NCM and source CaU with additive standard CAU remain.
Seven analytic nulls are retained as ∅ in original S/W/M tiers; shared standardization removes them from S standard. Nulls are silent in PHON, except a whole-null FORM receives PHON ∅. The six earlier reviewed correction records have been pruned: the transcription tables encode the same decisions, so each was re-applied as a no-op on every build. The decisions and their source locators remain in the corpus package.
Run CodeAndDocs/generate_xml.sh from the corpus package. It builds from committed inputs, applies corrections, cleans, standardizes and generates PHON with current shared tools, without a private PDF, network fetch or historical Git checkout. provenance.json records the tools used for the committed output and does not pin future builds. Validation and source refresh are separate.
Original PHON uses Orthographies/Ortho94/Amis.tsv, the bank's existing Coastal Ortho94 profile, and converts through the existing Amis_94_113.tsv; standard PHON uses Ortho113. Wu's letter inventory is Coastal Ortho94, so no corpus-specific orthography or conversion table is registered. The u→o spelling conversion merges Wu's u/o into Ortho113 Coastal's single o, which is the one reviewed phoneme-level difference.
The apostrophe is not converted. An earlier pass read Wu's ' as the glottal stop /ʔ/ and mapped it to Ortho113's ^; that was reverted in review. Ortho94 and Ortho113 agree that ' is /ʡ/ and ^ is /ʔ/, so the claim departed from both standards rather than from one of them; the corpus carries the apostrophe in two tokens of a single word type and no q or ^ at all, so there is no contrast in it to record; and the bank spells this very lexeme with an apostrophe — (ma)na'ay 'not want' appears 81 times in standard tiers across the Amis corpora with ' and never with ^. Source and conversion notes document these limitations and the exact source-inherent findings protected by tests.
Copyright
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. SIL International's published archive terms apply unless an item states otherwise; this paper has no conflicting terms. The maintainer verified the grant in January 2025. Credit Joy Wu and SIL International, retain the noncommercial/share-alike conditions, and identify the transcription and normalization changes. Rights evidence is available from the maintainer.
The corpus is also subject to the central FormosanBank Terms of Use and AI Use and Commercial Licensing.
Citation
In accordance with the Terms of Use, cite FormosanBank and:
Wu, Joy. 2006. The analysis of pa- verbs in Amis. Paper presented at the Tenth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, 17–20 January 2006, Puerto Princesa City, Palawan, Philippines.
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