A Grammar of Yélî Dnye: The Papuan Language of Rossel Island

Stephen C. Levinson

Open Access Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2022

A Grammar of Yélî Dnye

The Papuan Language of Rossel Island

Stephen C. Levinson
Funded by: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Volume 666 in the series Pacific Linguistics [PL]

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733853

Overview
Contents

About this book

Now in Paperback

This is a comprehensive description of a language spoken some 450 km offshore from the mainland of Papua New Guinea. The language is remarkable for its phonological, morphological and syntactic complexity. As the sole surviving member of its language family, and with little historical contact with surrounding languages, the language provides evidence of the kind of languages spoken in this part of the world before the Austronesian expansion.

The grammar provides detailed information on the phoneme inventory, morphology, syntax and select semantic fields. Remarkable features include a 90 phoneme inventory including unique sounds, a morphology with thousands of non-compositional portmanteau elements, complex rules for negation, and extensive ergative syntax. Unusual patterns are also found in the organization of semantic fields, for example in partonymies of the body, taxonomies of the natural world, verbal semantics and kinship terms. The combination of linguistic ‘rara’ suggest that linguistic evolution under low contact can yield baroque and unusual patterns. The volume should be of special interest to linguists, typologists, sociolinguists, anthropologists and researchers in Oceania and Melanesia.

Endorsement:

"This long-awaited grammar is a major contribution to Papuan and general linguistics, providing as it does by far the most comprehensive and accurate grammatical description of a language that has already assumed a position as one of the world's most complicated. Hitherto, the most extensive grammatical description of the language has been the survey-like Henderson (1995), and while Levinson explicitly acknowledges his debt to this earlier grammar and to unpublished work by Henderson, his own detailed grammar clearly takes the level of description and analysis of the language to a completely new level. In particular, Levinson's grammar makes clear precisely to what extent and in what ways the language's morphology is complex beyond even what most studies on morphologically complex languages envisage. In addition, it provides a much more detailed account of the language's syntax, based on a judicious combination of corpus attestation and careful elicitation (incl. using the kits developed by Levinson's group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics). The grammar thus not only fills a major lacuna in our knowledge of the non-Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area, but also provides grist for future studies on the implications of the language's complexities."
Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara

Author / Editor information

Stephen C. Levinson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Reviews

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	XIII
List of Figures Publicly Available Download PDF	XIX
List of Tables Publicly Available Download PDF	XXI
Conventions Publicly Available Download PDF	XXVII
1 Introduction: The language and its speakers Open Access Download PDF	1
Part I: The Grammar
2 The character of the language Open Access Download PDF	27
3 Phonology Open Access Download PDF	42
4 The lexicon: Morphemes, lexemes and parts of speech Open Access Download PDF	78
5 The noun phrase Open Access Download PDF	138
6 The verb complex Open Access Download PDF	167
7 The simple clause Open Access Download PDF	253
8 Complex sentences Open Access Download PDF	372
9 Yélî Dnye as a syntactically ergative language Open Access Download PDF	483
10 Negation – an overview Open Access Download PDF	495
Part II: Topics in semantics and language use
11 Lexical fields Open Access Download PDF	509
12 Taboo ‘languages’, special vocabularies and registers of Yélî Dnye Open Access Download PDF	548
Appendix I Places of major locations Open Access Download PDF	563
Appendix II Sample text Open Access Download PDF	565
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	573
Index Open Access Download PDF	583

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Audience: Researchers, Students in Linguistics, Anthropology, Oceania and Pacific Studies
Pages
- Front matter: 30
- Main content: 587
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 22
- Coloured Illustrations: 16
- Tables: 216
Keywords: Language Complexity and Evolution; Oceania/Papua/Melanesia; Language Isolate

eBook

Published: June 6, 2022
ISBN: 9783110733853

Hardcover

Published: June 6, 2022
ISBN: 9783110738476

Paperback

Published: October 24, 2023
ISBN: 9783111358666