A Grammar of Coastal Marind

Bruno Olsson*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Book/ReportBookpeer-review

    5 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    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.

    Original languageEnglish
    Publisherde Gruyter
    Number of pages587
    ISBN (Electronic)9783110747065
    ISBN (Print)9783110725551
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 8 Jun 2021

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