This grammar provides a grammatical description of Palula, an Indo-Aryan language of the Shina group. The language is spoken by about 10,000 people in the Chitral district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. This is the first extensive description of the formerly little-documented Palula language, and is one of only a few in-depth studies available for languages in the extremely multilingual Hindukush-Karakoram region. The grammar is based on original fieldwork data, collected over the course of about ten years, commencing in 1998. It is primarily in the form of recorded, mainly narrative, texts, but supplemented by targeted elicitation as well as notes of observed language use. All fieldwork was conducted in close collaboration with the Palula-speaking community, and a number of native speakers took active part in the process of data gathering, annotation and data management. The main areas covered are phonology, morphology and syntax, illustrated with a large number of example items and utterances, but also a few selected lexical topics of some prominence have received a more detailed treatment as part of the morphosyntactic structure. Suggestions for further research that should be undertaken are given throughout the grammar. The approach is theory-informed rather than theory-driven, but an underlying functional-typological framework is assumed. Diachronic development is taken into account, particularly in the area of morphology, and comparisons with other languages and references to areal phenomena are included insofar as they are motivated and available. The description also provides a brief introduction to the speaker community and their immediate environment.

Japhug is a vulnerable Gyalrongic language, which belongs to the Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family. It is spoken by several thousand speakers in Mbarkham county, Rngaba district, Sichuan province, China. This grammar is the result of nearly 20 years of fieldwork on one variety of Japhug, based on a corpus of narratives and conversations, a large part of which is available from the Pangloss Collection. It covers the whole grammar of the language, and the text examples provide a unique insight into Gyalrong culture. It was written with a general linguistics audience in mind, and should prove useful not only to specialists of Trans-Himalayan historical linguistics and typologists, but also to anthropologists doing research in Gyalrong areas. It is also hoped that some readers will use it to learn Japhug and pursue research on this fascinating language in the future.

This book is a grammatical description of Ulwa, a Papuan language spoken by about 600 people living in four villages in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Ulwa belongs to the Keram language family. This grammatical description is based on a corpus of recorded texts and elicited sentences that were collected during a total of about twelve months of research carried out between 2015 and 2018. The book aims to detail as many aspects of Ulwa grammar as possible, including matters of phonology, morphology, and syntax. It also contains a lexicon with over 1,400 entries and three fully glossed and translated texts. The book was written with a typologically oriented audience in mind, and should be of interest to Papuan specialists as well as to general linguists. It may be useful to those working on the history or classification of Papuan languages as well as those conducting typological research on any number of grammatical features.

Pichi is an Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. It is an offshoot of 19th century Krio (Sierra Leone) and shares many characteristics with West African relatives like Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English, as well as with the English-lexifier creoles of the insular and continental Caribbean. This comprehensive description presents a detailed analysis of the grammar and phonology of Pichi. It also includes a collection of texts and wordlists. Pichi features a nominative-accusative alignment, SVO word order, adjective-noun order, prenominal determiners, and prepositions. The language has a seven-vowel system and twenty-two consonant phonemes. Pichi has a two-tone system with tonal minimal pairs, morphological tone, and tonal processes. The morphological structure is largely isolating. Pichi has a rich system of tense-aspect-mood marking, an indicative-subjunctive opposition, and a complex copular system with several suppletive forms. Many features align Pichi with the Atlantic-Congo languages spoken in the West African littoral zone. At the same time, characteristics like the prenominal position of adjectives and determiners show a typological overlap with its lexifier English, while extensive contact with Spanish has left an imprint on the lexicon and grammar as well.

Komnzo is a Papuan language of Southern New Guinea spoken by around 250 people in the village of Rouku. Komnzo belongs to the Tonda subgroup of the Yam language family, which is also known as the Morehead Upper-Maro group. This grammar provides the first comprehensive description of a Yam language. It is based on 16 months of fieldwork. The primary source of data is a text corpus of around 12 hours recorded and transcribed between 2010 and 2015. Komnzo provides many fields of future research, but the most interesting aspect of its structure lies in the verb morphology, to which the two largest chapters of the grammar are dedicated. Komnzo verbs may index up to two arguments showing agreement in person, number and gender. Verbs encode 18 TAM categories, valency, directionality and deictic status. Morphological complexity lies not only in the amount of categories that verbs may express, but also in the way these are encoded. Komnzo verbs exhibit what may be called ‘distributed exponence’, i.e. single morphemes are underspecified for a particular grammatical category. Therefore, morphological material from different sites has to be integrated first, and only after this integration can one arrive at a particular grammatical category. The descriptive approach in this grammar is theory-informed rather than theory-driven. Comparison to other Yam languages and diachronic developments are taken into account whenever it seems helpful.

This book provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the Sierra Tarahumara, a mountainous range in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua belonging to the Sierra Madre Occidental. A documentary corpus developed between 2003 and 2018 with Choguita Rarámuri language experts informs the analysis and is the source of the examples presented in this grammar. The documentary corpus, which consists of over 200 hours of recordings of elicited data, narratives, conversations, interviews, and other speech genres, is available in two archival collections housed at the Endangered Languages Archive and at UC Berkeley’s Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. Choguita Rarámuri is a highly synthetic, agglutinating language with a complex morphological system. It displays many of the recurrent structural features documented across Uto-Aztecan, including a predominance of suffixation, head-marking, and patterns of noun-incorporation and compounding (Sapir 1921; Whorf 1935; Haugen 2008b). Other features of typological and theoretical interest include a complex word prosodic system, a wide range of morphologically conditioned phonological processes, and patterns of variable affix order and multiple exponence. Choguita Rarámuri is also of great comparative/historical importance: while several analytical works of Uto-Aztecan languages of Northern Mexico have been produced in the last years (Guerrero Valenzuela 2006, García Salido 2014, Reyes Taboada 2014, Morales Moreno 2016, Villalpando Quiñonez 2019, inter alia), many varieties still lack comprehensive linguistic description and documentation.

This book is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island. After an introductory chapter, the grammar deals with phonology, word classes, the noun phrase, possession, the verb phrase, verbal and nonverbal clauses, mood and negation, and clause combinations. The phonology of Rapa Nui reveals certain issues of typological interest, such as the existence of strict conditions on the phonological shape of words, word-final devoicing, and reduplication patterns motivated by metrical constraints. For Polynesian languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs in the lexicon has often been denied; in this grammar it is argued that this distinction is needed for Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui has sometimes been characterised as an ergative language; this grammar shows that it is unambiguously accusative. Subject and object marking depend on an interplay of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. Other distinctive features of the language include the existence of a ‘neutral’ aspect marker, a serial verb construction, the emergence of copula verbs, a possessive-relative construction, and a tendency to maximise the use of the nominal domain. Rapa Nui’s relationship to the other Polynesian languages is a recurring theme in this grammar; the relationship to Tahitian (which has profoundly influenced Rapa Nui) especially deserves attention. The grammar is supplemented with a number of interlinear texts, two maps and a subject index.

This book presents a synchronic grammar of the southern dialects of Yauyos, an extremely endangered Quechuan language spoken in the Peruvian Andes. As the language is highly synthetic, the grammar focuses principally on morphology; a longer section is dedicated to the language's unusual evidential system. The grammar's 1400 examples are drawn from a 24-hour corpus of transcribed recordings collected in the course of the documentation of the language.

This book presents an in-depth linguistic description of one Papuan Malay variety, based on sixteen hours of recordings of spontaneous narratives and conversations between Papuan Malay speakers. ‘Papuan Malay’ refers to the easternmost varieties of Malay (Austronesian). They are spoken in the coastal areas of West Papua, the western part of the island of New Guinea. The variety described here is spoken along West Papua’s northeast coast. Papuan Malay is the language of wider communication and the first or second language for an ever-increasing number of people of the area. While Papuan Malay is not officially recognized and therefore not used in formal government or educational settings or for religious preaching, it is used in all other domains, including unofficial use in formal settings, and, to some extent, in the public media. After a general introduction to the language, its setting, and history, this grammar discusses the following topics, building up from smaller grammatical constituents to larger ones: phonology, word formation, noun and prepositional phrases, verbal and nonverbal clauses, non-declarative clauses, and conjunctions and constituent combining. Of special interest to linguists, typologists, and Malay specialists are the following in-depth analyses and descriptions: affixation and its productivity across domains of language choice, reduplication and its gesamtbedeutung, personal pronouns and their adnominal uses, demonstratives and locatives and their extended uses, and adnominal possessive relations and their non- canonical uses. This study provides a point of comparison for further studies in other (Papuan) Malay varieties and a starting point for Papuan Malay language development efforts.

This grammar provides a synchronic grammatical description of Mauwake, a Papuan Trans-New Guinea (TNG) language of about 2000 speakers on the north coast of the Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. It is the first book-length treatment of the Mauwake language and the only published grammar of the Kumil subgroup to date. Relying on other existing published and unpublished grammars, the author shows how the language is similar to, or different from, related TNG languages especially in the Madang province. The grammar gives a brief introduction to the Mauwake people, their environment and their culture. Although the book mainly covers morphology and syntax, it also includes ashort treatment of the phonological system and the orthography. The description of the grammatical units proceeds from the words/morphology to the phrases, clauses, sentence types and clause combinations. The chapter on functional domains is the only one where the organization is based on meaning/function rather than structure. The longest chapter in the book is on morphology, with verbs taking the central stage. The final chapter deals with the pragmatic functions theme, topic and focus. 13 texts by native speakers, mostly recorded and transcribed but some originally written, are included in the Appendix with morpheme-by-morpheme glosses and a free translation. The theoretical approach used is that of Basic Linguistic Theory. Language typologists and professional Papuanist linguists are naturally one target audience for the grammar. But also two other possible, and important, audiences influenced especially the style the writing: well educated Mauwake speakers interested in their language, and those other Papua New Guineans who have some basic training in linguistics and are keen to explore their own languages.