Otto Dempwolff is far better known for his historical and comparative work than for his descriptive and theoretical contributions to linguistics. However, the work to which he devoted his last efforts before he died in 1938 was a grammatical description of Jabêm, an Austronesian language adopted and spread as a church and school lingua franca by the German Lutheran mission in what is now Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Although Jabêm is one of the best-documented languages in Melanesia (at least in Jabêm and German), the only materials available in English have been Streicher’s (1982) Jabêm-English Dictionary, a brief grammar sketch in Tryon’s (1995) Comparative Austronesian Dictionary, and sporadic articles on Jabêm tonogenesis and verb serialization. This translation of Otto Dempwolff’s grammar now adds a comprehensive overview and data-rich synthesis of Jabêm grammar. Because he wrote his grammar at the request of the Lutheran missionaries, Dempwolff took care to make his description understandable to an audience of educated lay people as well as to linguists by explaining his terminology and reasoning as he introduced new topics. This task was made all the more necessary because he considered Jabêm to be the most difficult Melanesian language he had ever encountered, one for which European grammatical models proved entirely inadequate. The result is a highly original, yet surprisingly accessible grammatical description by one of the founders of Austronesian comparative linguistics.

Recent studies on the syntax and semantics of complex sentences have dealt with several challenges to the traditional boundaries between coordination and subordination. Some constructions belong to one of the two types according to syntactic criteria but relate to the other type on semantic grounds, whereas other constructions are not compatible with either the canonical syntactic or semantic tests traditionally employed to establish this distinction. Other constructions, by contrast, seem to have evolved in such a way that they now cross the divide between both types. The collection of papers in this volume delves further into the theoretical implications of previous analyses and focuses on a wide array of data from different languages, taking those challenges as a point of departure to develop innovative perspectives and to advance thought-provoking ideas.

This new volume of the Language Family Series presents an overview of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian languages, spread across a region embracing eastern Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. It provides sufficient phonological and grammatical data to give typologists and comparativists a good idea of the nature of these languag

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.