A Grammar of Coastal Marind

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.

About the author

Bruno Olsson, Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

Product details

• Authors: Bruno Olsson
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 16.11.2022
• EAN: 9783111120775
• ISBN: 978-3-11-112077-5
• No. of pages: 587
• Dimensions: 170 mm x 36 mm x 240 mm
• Weight: 1024 g
• Illustrations: 18 b/w ill., 89 b/w tbl.
• Series: Mouton Grammar Library [MGL]; ISSN; Mouton Grammar Library [MGL], 87
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics