Details

This grammar provides the first modern, comprehensive description of Coastal Marind. It is a Papuan language spoken by the coastal-dwelling Marind-Anim, formerly expansionistic head-hunters of the Southern New Guinea lowlands. Like the other languages of the poorly known Anim family, Coastal Marind features astonishingly complex verb morphology and a range of unusual phenomena, including indexing of up to four arguments on the verb, verbal marking of focus (the 'Orientation' system), engagement prefixes tracking the attention of the addressee, and a system of four genders realised by intricate agreement patterns. The structure of the language is examined in a detailed but accessible way, and its many complexities are brought to life by contextualised spontaneous data, drawn from a rich audio-visual corpus.

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of maps, tables and figures
• Abbreviations and conventions
• 1 Preliminaries
• 2 Phonology
• 3 Nominals, their morphology and derivation
• 4 Pronouns and demonstratives
• 5 Nominal gender
• 6 Adpositions and particles
• 7 The syntax of phrases
• 8 Overview of the verb
• 9 Participant indexing I: The Actor, Dative and Genitive prefixes
• 10 Participant indexing II: Undergoer alternations
• 11 The system of Verb Orientation
• 12 Valence classes
• 13 Valence-changing constructions
• 14 Tense and aspect
• 15 Mood, attitude and engagement
• 16 Distribution of events in time and space
• 17 The Auxiliary, copula clauses and light verbs
• 18 Basic clausal syntax
• 19 Non-declarative speech acts
• 20 Combinations of clauses
• Appendix: Texts
• Bibliography
• Index