A grammar of Iatmul
Gerd JendraschekThis is a grammatical description of the Papuan language Iatmul. It is based on almost fourteen months of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, distributed over four trips in 2005/2006, 2007, and 2008. The structure of the book is as follows: Chapter 1 presents the language, its genetic affiliation, and its typological profile; the area where it is spoken and its sociolinguistic situation; and the fieldwork setting. Chapter 2 describes the phonology. Chapters 3-8 deal mostly with morphological issues, while chapters 9-15 describe phenomena pertaining to both morphology and syntax. Chapters 16-18 are about interclausal relations. Chapter 19 discusses verb-argument relations and the order of constituents in the clause. Chapter 20 goes beyond morphosyntax and discusses two semantic areas of cross-linguistic relevance, the versatility of speech report constructions, and the extreme polysemy of certain lexical roots. Chapter 21 deals with sociolinguistic topics, strategies for lexical enrichment on the one hand, and language shift and its structural correlate, language obsolescence, on the other. The appendix includes six fully glossed, translated, and annotated texts, a short word-list, and a list of all affixes.
