The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea

Alexandra Aikhenvald

OUP Oxford, Jun 17, 2010 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 732 pages

This book is the first comprehensive description of the Manambu language of Papua New Guinea and is based entirely on the author's immersion fieldwork. Manambu belongs to the Ndu language family, and is spoken by about 2,500 people in five villages: Avatip, Yawabak, Malu, Apa:n, and Yambon (Yuanab) in East Sepik Province, Ambunti district. Manambu can be considered an endangered language. The Manambu language has many unusual properties. Every noun is considered masculine or feminine. Feminine gender - which is unmarked - is associated with small size and round shape, and masculine gender with elongated shape, large size, and importance. The Manambu culture is centered on ownership of personal names, and is similar to that of the Iatmul, described by Gregory Bateson. After an introductory account of the language and its speakers, Professor Aikhenvald devotes chapters to phonology, grammatical relations, word classes, gender, semantics, number, case, possession, derivation and compounding, pronouns, morphohology, verbs, mood and modality, negation, clause structure, pragmatics, discourse, semantics, the lexicon, current directions of change, and genetic relationship to other languages. The description is presented in a clear style in a framework that will be comprehensible to all linguists and linguistically oriented anthropologists.

Contents

• The Language and its Speakers: 1
• 2 Phonology: 36
• 3 Grammatical Relations: 61
• 4 Word Classes: 71
• 5 Gender Marking Semantics and Agreement: 112
• 6 Number: 130
• 7 Case Marking: 144
• 8 Possession: 168
• 9 Derivation and Compounding: 179
• 10 Closed Classes: 197
• 11 Predicate Structure and Verb Root Types: 244
• 12 Verbal Categories in Positive Declarative and Interrogative Clauses: 254
• 13 Mood and Modality: 276
• 14 Negation: 298
• 15 Verb Compounding: 338
• 16 Directionals and ValencyChanging Devices: 377
• 17 Complex Predicates: 424
• 18 Clause Linking and Dependent Clauses: 446
• 19 Other Dependent Clauses and Further Features of Clause Linking: 466
• 20 Clause Types and DiscoursePragmatic Devices: 507
• 21 Issues in Semantics and Features of Lexicon: 551
• 22 Genetic and Areal Relationships and New Developments in the Language: 591
• Texts: 627
• Vocabulary: 665
• List of Affixes: 676
• References: 679
• Index of Authors Languages and Subjects: 689

About the author

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Professor and Research Leader (People and Societies of the Tropics) in the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. She has worked on descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and has published, in Russian, a grammar of Modern Hebrew (1990; second edition 2009). She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995, based on work with the last speaker who has since died) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages. Other books include Classifiers: a Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000, paperback 2003), Language Contact in Amazonia (2002) and Evidentiality (2004, paperback 2006), all published by OUP. She is co-editor with R. M. W. Dixon of the OUP series Explorations in Linguistic Typology, the fifth volume of which, The Semantics of Clause Linking, appeared in 2009.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea
• Author: Alexandra Aikhenvald
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2010
• ISBN: 019161534X, 9780191615344
• Length: 732 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / General; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Syntax; Language Arts & Disciplines / Reference; Social Science / Anthropology / General