The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea de Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

This book presents the first comprehensive description of the Manambu language of Papua New Guinea. 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. About 200-400 speakers live in the cities of Port Moresby, Wewak, Lae, and Madang; and a few live in Kokopo and Mount Hagen. The book is based entirely on the author's fieldwork.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, morphology, verbs, mood and modality, negation, clauses, 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 linguistic anthropologists.

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Recenzii

to call it merely a "grammar" does not do justice to the extraordinary accomplishment and intellectual richness represented by this book. In so many ways, Aikhenvald's book qualifies as a model of what linguists with modern sensitivities should be aiming for when setting out to write a grammar of an indigenous language based on fieldwork ... In summary, Aikhenvald's grammar of Manambu is a sheer tour de force, not just on account of the thoroughness of the grammatical description and analysis, but equally on account of the depth of the engagement of the researcher with the speakers and the community as reflected throughout the book.

Notă biografică

Alexandra Aikhenvald is Professor of Linguistics and Deputy Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University. Her books include Structural and Typological Classification of Berber (Moscow 1986-7), Modern Hebrew (Moscow 1990), Classifiers (OUP 2000), Language Contact in Amazonia (OUP 2002), and Evidentiality (OUP 2004). She is co-editor with R. M. W. Dixon of the OUP series Explorations in Linguistic Typology in which four volumes have so far appeared.